From Barbados Advocate

It’s just a matter of time before America lifts its travel ban on Cuba, and when that happens, a flood of pent up demand will be unleashed, bringing with it a monumental threat to the tourism dependent English-speaking Caribbean.

This was the expressed view of Grenadian-based tourism consultant, Brian Samuel, which he shared during a panel discussion on measuring tourism growth in the Caribbean. The panel discussion, hosted by the Caribbean Tourism Organisation and aired on their television channel Destination Caribbean, took place last week at the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) headquarters in Harbour Road, St. Michael.

Samuel, who shared the panel with local business journalist Patrick Hoyos and Winfield Griffith, Director of Research at CTO, said that the Dominican Republic (DR) and Cuba were able to offer between 30 000 to 50 000 hotel rooms, compared with Grenada, for example, which only had a room stock of 1 600.

Samuel shared his views on several aspects of Caribbean tourism, which caused it to struggle with competitiveness when compared to these countries which were closer to the USA, a major source market for the region. He shared his views on what he felt was a mismatch between the production of regional agricultural industries and demand of food which hotels required, adding that hoteliers could not be blamed for importing a significant portion of their food requirements if one of the main reasons for this was not getting a constant supply of adequate, locally sourced foods.

He said that given his experience working in the hotel sector, hotels actually preferred to source food locally as to do so was easier. The agricultural sectors needed, he said, to take advantage of whatever resources were being made available to them to raise their levels of production.

Samuel, though agreeing to the idea of promoting and advertising the Caribbean as one destination to ensure its survival in the tourism market, was not so optimistic that regional governments were willing to put the necessary investments into a single marketing strategy.

He believed that though CARICOM member states talked about the concept of One Caribbean, One Destination, each country was still bent on getting tourists to come to their country first.

However, Jon Martineau, former General Manager of Accra Beach Hotel and Spa, was of the view that a single marketing strategy was necessary for the industry to be sustainable. “We need to advertise the Caribbean as one destination and when we do that, [island by island] we need to decide what we are best at and look at the niche marketing aspect of the Caribbean… We have to stop trying to be everything to everybody because that is not working,” he charged.

He said that when such a project was attempted years ago, spearheaded by CTO, statistics showed that visitor arrivals increased.

Martineau argued that regional member states needed to be equally dedicated to putting funds towards the marketing of the region, adding that currently only two or three states were actively funding such a strategy. (RS)

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IMAGE: www.elorientedecuba.org