Weekly Column

Recently, a strange phenomenon has overtaken the public utterances of Ministers of this country.

It started with Prime Minister David Thompson, who trumpeted the success of his economic policies, with the astounding boast that employment had grown by 0.1 percentage points at the end of the second quarter. Well now Minister of Tourism Richard Sealy has followed suit with the even more remarkable brag that tourist arrivals will only decline by 10% this year.

Clearly Richard Sealy thought it important to hold a press conference to give us this depressing news - in a lame attempt to refute Mia Mottley’s claim that arrivals for the first half of October were down by 20% - a fact that he did not refute. Minister Sealy chose instead to compare apples with oranges by quoting arrival figures up to the end of September, which he shamelessly put at 11.5% lower than last year.

Mia Mottley is on record as predicting an overall decline in long stay arrivals of 12% for this year. When you add the decline in 2008 you begin to get a better picture of just where our tourism industry is heading.

It is time that the Prime Minister comes to the stark realisation that tourism under Richard Sealy is trending in the wrong direction – downwards. Sealy does not seem to understand that marketing, particularly in times of economic recession, needs to be concentrated in the markets where we have proven success.

Brand loyalty should be the cornerstone of our marketing thrust. Now is not the time to dilute scarce and inadequate marketing dollars in fiercely competitive new markets that take years to develop.

Given the economic profile of many of our visitors from the United Kingdom, we should be going all out to retain this market in a focused, targeted way. It is a well-known fact that high net worth individuals, like those from the United Kingdom, do not easily eliminate leisure activities from their lifestyle, even in times of recession.

Tourism is however, more importantly, much more than tourist arrivals. Having earned $2.5 billion for the country in 2007 and $2.2 billion in 2008, we will be lucky if tourism earns $2 billion this year for us.

Further, up to the end of 2007 it was also the source of considerable private foreign investment that spurred activity in the construction sector and with it thousands of jobs for skilled Barbadian artisans. This has dropped off considerably. This gives us a better appreciation for the magnitude of the crisis and the effect it will have on the economy.

Our chief foreign exchange earner is limping along and is in need of an urgent rescue plan if it is going to do its part in pulling us out of the recession.

Restaurants are closing, water sports operators are barely afloat, tour operators and taxi drivers are all struggling despite the increase in cruise ship arrival brokered by the BLP long before Richard Sealy landed with a thud in the Ministry of Tourism.

It is time for a new, scientific approach to how and where we spend our marketing dollars and not the “I feel so” approach being employed by Sealy.

Given what we stand to lose it is also time that the Government put every available dollar into marketing Barbados and to stop pretending that in a time of economic crisis - that the Diaspora market is a viable strategy.
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