TOURIST BOOM IN ISRAEL

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 7

TOURIST BOOM IN ISRAEL

Agent’s Plan For Special Hotels (From a Reuter Correspondent) TEL AVIV. With ChriStm-as pilgrims 'and tourists seeking winter sunshine still to come, the tourist industry in Israel has already set up an all-time record this year. By the end of October, Israel had received a total of 100,000 visitors—compared with a total of 85,000 for the whole of last year, 22,000 in 1949, and barely 3000 in 1952. One recent visitor, Mr Sam Flnegold, an American tourist agent on a month’s “busman’s holiday,” has a revolutionary proposal for making Israel a tourist’s paradise. Arguing that people want to see the Israel of the Kibbutzim and of girl soldiers in the army, just as they expect to see Westminster Abbey, and pubs and bobbies in London, or the Folies Bergere and the Left Bank in Paris, he believes that tourists would like to “rough.” it in special Kibbutz hotels. These hotels, built as rough log cabins with loopholes instead of windows, with trenches and barbed wire to lend “local colour” should, he says, be attached to real Kibbutzim (independent collective villages). Added local colour could be given by inviting guests to join the watchman on guard duty, to get up early and milk the cows, or to help in the fields. Recognising, however, that tourists would naturally want to "rough” it the easy way, Mr Finegold says a chain of such Kibbutz hotels should look rough only on the outside.

Inside, he says, the buildings would have to be air-conditioned, with private tiled bathrooms to every room, although the perfectly sprung beds covered with smooth percale sheets might have rough, Bedouin camel blankets on top—for more local colour.