RECONCILING THE LIVING LANDSCAPE WITH OUR LIVING CULTURE

Conservation townscape ideas and understandings move with generations and innovations (Fallowwell et.al, 2010). As new generations respond to an electronic and globalised world, daily life and public policy seem to respond to events, often leaving the settings to take care of themselves. Often the only environmental response is to ensure basic facilities, or to enhance for the benefit of an essentially tourist market. The historic context of many decisions is having a hard time. One is not to compliment oneself on a job well done, nor does society often understand what one is doing. It is seen as a desirable commodity for those who can afford it, a significant factor in Western planning perhaps, but modest when faced with community protest for basic facilities. It is somewhat of a luxury, and it is treated as such. Culturally and politically one relies on the shared meanings and understandings behind current public life, and therefore on the landscape, both the green landscape and built settings provide a mental context for one's actions. So when London is mentioned a particular image of London comes to mind. That image might be a complex overlay of television images, personal visits, narrations from relatives, or political events. They all come together and everyone has a different image. The next decision about London, will be based on a combination of those images. The big question remains as to how, and to what degree, should these contexts be conserved, maintained and promoted in contemporary cultural life? The argument in this paper is around the fact that these past remnants are not just for the package holiday visitor, but their presentation serves as an essential, visible text to remind citizens of the origin of their current beliefs and aspirations. They are markers of where one has been. Urban squares, buildings, and routes, and the arrangement of rural land provide the textbook for what is to be retained, retrieved or rejected in the future, they are part of personal encyclopedias. They are often more eloquent and universal in their language than the modern polemic, and ways must be found for re-incorporating them into the thought process of a contemporary population. It is 'thinking differently' by the current generations, as well as the generations that are to follow, that is both interesting as well as very disturbing. Electronic media should be used to learn about place, but it also means that a lot of older ideas need to be re-evaluated with a big task at hand for teachers. The challenge for those who choose to conserve and understand such places is how to integrate them with the current ways of knowing. Keywords: Heritage, Urban Meanings, Culture, Landscape

Managing Revenue

Maximising revenues is as important as minimising costs to achieve profits. The usual (sales and marketing or revenue management) approach is to try and gain additional business – and we will cover some of this here. However, since this is a book about control we’ll be looking more at ways of ensuring that you get all your revenue from existing customers. If you work in a section where only costs occur, much of this chapter may seem irrelevant, but you may have ‘revenue’ from a subsidy or allowance and you certainly still have customers. I hope you will gain an insight into practices in other sectors that may help you in the future, if not just now. You have to ensure that everything a customer consumes is actually paid for and that you aren’t giving it away, wasting it or losing it to fraud. This applies to a take-away, a drink, a package holiday or a five-star meal – all can lose revenues by inadequate control. In some sectors this may be more obvious as they have much stronger control mechanisms – in others it may be difficult to see easily where problems might occur. We look at pricing in Chapter 5 but it’s important to recognise now that there shouldn’t be a conflict between marketing and control – the stakeholder approach means that everybody is interested in the business doing well. The controller wants good revenues as well as the marketing or revenue manager because this should result in good profits, which means good employment for them (in all its aspects). By the end of this chapter you should be able to: - Identify the features which may impact on revenue maximisation - Understand the differences between revenue management and revenue control - Identify where shortfalls can occur, using ratios - Calculate ratios for a range of revenue areas - Utilise methods of improving revenues.

Another face of ‘mass tourism’: San Sebastián and Spanish beach resorts under Franco, 1936–1975

ABSTRACT:Histories of the ‘mass tourism’ of sunshine and beaches, and of the ‘package holiday’, in post-war Europe have tended to focus on the activities of big international companies and the role of governments. This has certainly been the case in Spain. This article recovers an earlier version of the urban history of coastal tourism in southern Europe, focusing on the resort of San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, and thereby drawing attention to the neglected Atlantic dimension of Spanish coastal tourism. It then examines the responses of an established resort and summer capital to the new developments of the post-Civil War years, and shows how the decline of an older model of aristocratic tourism was counterbalanced by the development of new holiday markets and practices, many of which arose spontaneously beyond the regulatory and promotional gaze of the local authorities.