Anguilla News covers Anguilla and the wider
Caribbean.
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Winds Of
Change Confront Caribbean Tourism
Date Posted: March 29, 2008.
NEW YORK - Reverend A.R. Bernard, founder and CEO of
the Brooklyn-based Christian Cultural Center, the church
home for thousands of Caribbean-Americans in the tri-state
area, teaches that "Change is the only constant in life; And
when change is necessary, not to change is destructive."
It is fitting to share this principle as the Caribbean's
travel and tourism industry undergoes a transformation as
"old things are passed away and all things are become new."
Senator Allen Chastanet, St. Lucia's Minister of Tourism and
Civil Aviation who currently serves as the chairman of the
Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO), told an industry
audience recently that "as we prepare for the future, we
need a change in perspective and attitude. We need to fight
complacency, to define success, not by relying on
traditional indicators such as visitor arrivals, but by
measuring our performance against our potential. Too often
in this region, we settle for mediocrity without fully
understanding that the good is the enemy of the best. Real
success is when we rise to our true potential."
Today, the Caribbean's tourism industry, faced by serious
competition from regions such as Latin America, Asia and the
Pacific, and closer to home in the "Sunshine State" of
Florida, has not risen to its true potential, registering -
in spite of the region's competitive advantage - a mere two
and a half percent growth last year compared to worldwide
increases of seven percent.
While our lifeblood industry has had its challenges, the
foremost of those being the US passport requirement for
American visitors when returning home, several destinations
such as Anguilla, Bahamas Bermuda, the Dominican Republic,
Puerto Rico and Turks & Caicos have re-positioned their
destinations as attractive locales for business, vacation
and investment while ably guided by some astute and
visionary leaders.
Others like Jamaica, St. Lucia and the United States Virgin
Islands are being led by a refreshing new generation of
public servants who are transferring their experience and
expertise from the private sector to help meet the
socio-economic needs of local communities.
But overall the Caribbean is losing its market share, a
setback that requires an urgent comeback.
Former sacred cows such as beloved regional carrier LIAT and
regional organisations like the Caribbean Tourism
Organisation and its private sector cousin the Caribbean
Hotel Association (CHA), are no longer exempt from criticism
and their current leaders deserve appreciation for taking a
close look at their relevance in today's rapidly changing
world where customers and constituents are demanding more.
The CTO has already begun to restructure by requiring
Ministers of Tourism to meet separately and apart from
directors, thereby distinguishing the crafting of regional
policy from its implementation. Once policies have been set,
directors and commissioners can then use their creative
imagination and skills to develop plans and programmes that
help to aggressively position the Caribbean's brand, without
too much interference from the politicians.
CHA too is seriously looking at restructuring itself. Having
downsized its San Juan, Puerto Rico operations to have its
affairs centrally managed from the Miami office, CHA wants
to change its name, to go beyond hotel members and fully
embrace the wider constituency of Caribbean tourism
stakeholders, such as attractions, banks, farmers, lawyers,
doctors who each provide services and benefit from tourism.
A wise man once said you cannot heal a thing by saying it is
not there. It is no surprise therefore that today's young
tourism turks are peeling off the scales, identifying our
inefficiencies and making changes that our embattled leaders
have been reluctant to make in the past.
Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, CTO's Secretary General, notes
"The level of innovation that is required confronts us with
a very steep hill to climb. In order to do so, we have to go
through the "creative destruction" process that the
economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago was most
necessary for significant leaps in progress.
"We in the Caribbean have long wanted to 'eat our cake and
have it too'. We want to make the changes necessary for
progress but we also want to preserve all of the current
practices and processes at the same time. True progress does
not permit that outcome. True progress always requires that
there be "winners" and "losers" and that the benefits
delivered by the "winners" far outweigh the total losses of
the "losers". We cannot abide the idea that there must be
some losers in the wake of progress."
More changes are on the horizon, but we must be mindful that
the more things change, the more they don't stay the same.
Whether it is anticipating the needs of customers, providing
value-added services, implementing serious measures to
combat crime and changing our approach to marketing, there
is unquestionably the need for serious action in the
Caribbean.
But, alas, we must be committed to our confessions.
Bevan Springer, the Director of Counterpart International's
Caribbean Media Exchange on Sustainable Tourism (CMEx), is a
journalist and communications advisor.
