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CHAIRMAN'S LETTER
To Members of the Club:
I refer you to the full
minutes of the May 15th meeting of MAC and to some future
articles by other MAC members that will appear in the coming weeks (or in a
full newsletter) for a full understanding of the recent activity of your
elected MAC. To a large extent, the relationship with the Developer/General
Manager continues to improve, and I think it's significant that in
recognition of its role, MAC has now moved to communicating its "Advice" to
the Developer and General Manager in writing, and is copying both the Club
the members (by posting it also elsewhere on this site) and the Department of
Tourism on it. This process establishes a trail of what the MAC is advising
the Club on your behalf, and will allow the membership to measure the impact
of and the Club's reaction to that advice. The copy we have posted elsewhere
in this site is interspersed with management's response to each of our advice
topics.
We appreciate that all that most Members want or expect
from their membership is to have an enjoyable vacation week. However, the
most significant contribution to the MAC's ability to advise the Club on your
behalf is your response to survey questions that we have begun to send you.
Please take the time to respond when you get those questions. Of the 1,700
members whose email addresses the Club has, and who were sent the recent
survey, less than 500 members attempted a reply, and only 161 actually
completed the survey. We would welcome greater input from you, but we looked
at every one of those responses, and the comments made by those members
appear to us to have come from those members who feel most strongly about the
Club and about improving the vacation experience.
Among the recent accomplishments of MAC, the Department of
Tourism and John Kyle working together with the Chamber of Commerce was our
obtaining the permission of the government for Club members to play golf on
the adjacent course "at their own risk" - a reversal of last year's policy
that had prohibited use of the course. This change resulted from our
discussion in February with the Director of Tourism who attended our
on-island meeting. I actually "played" several holes last week while using
one of my weeks - and my advice to golfers is to wear two pair of calf-length
socks if and when you play, to ward off the significant numbers of weed burrs
that you'll pick up walking the fairways! I also suggest that your putting
game will not likely improve on the greens as they now exist. And a last
thought - if you are economizing on clubs to bring along, you can leave your
sand wedge home because the traps are pretty overgrown with weeds. But at
least being on the course was more fun than just looking at it!
Finally, without editorializing on the subject, I'll
remind you that Bermuda itself is currently enduring some persistent and
unsettling social changes, the result of which has not in any way improved
safety concerns for visitors. To keep up on developments, I urge you to log
onto the Royal Gazette website (www.royalgazette.com
) from time to time, and particularly in the weeks before your next visit.
We hope to see many of you at this year's Annual General
Meeting, a meeting that is being held for the first time in Canada, on
October 23rd, at the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
More details to follow.
Roy Van Brunt, MAC Chairman
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