Thursday, November 21, 2013

Caribbean Tourism – The Numbers Game

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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cruise ship passengers spend very little onshore. Flights from Europe to St. Lucia are very expensive for the British people. They go now to Greece and Turkey. Look
at all the dilapidated bars and restaurants in Rodney Bay. Many are closed. The Rodney Bay Marina parking full of potholes and closed bars due to a lack of customers. Piles of houses for sale in Gros Islet area.
Many foreigners who bought or built a home 8 to 10 years ago, want to leave the island and sell their homes.
Piles of cars for sale, as people cannot afford them anymore. Banks have a lot of bad loans in their books.

November 22, 2013 at 4:00 AM
Anonymous said...

Above, Most of what you say is nothing new!!!

November 22, 2013 at 6:41 AM
Anonymous said...

The Minister should resign. He has not shown that he is the right man for the job. The marketing is poor, but the underlying thing is, the Hotels in St. Lucia are still too expensive. Cuba is drawing the majority of tourists from Europe and Canada. Ohhh, the Tax.

November 22, 2013 at 12:34 PM
Anonymous said...

Saint Lucia as the largest economy in the OECS has to lead the way for the group, out of the inherited ripple effect and contagion of the North's recession.

This is an article steeped in the realities of tourism management, development, and economics especially. Kudos to the writer.

If commentator #2 is so sure that there is so little that is new up there, then it is a very sad commentary on the calibre and capacity of regional tourism ministers PAST and PRESENT, and the mandarins mandated to assist them (a la Sir Arthur Lewis) in translating their (apparently empty?) rhetoric into meaningful tourism-based or tourism-driven, but national development policy initiatives.

Based on the analysis above, together, these actors appear to be clueless about how to grapple with our present-day realities, other than, at best, simplistically regurgitating almost verbatim, 'their pearls of wisdom' lifted from textbooks aimed at students (some of which are MBAs -- so-called) for tourism environments in the North, as this relates to the North-South Divide.

The tourism-spend, the related tourism multiplier, and the strategic integration (backward and forward) are the key issues referenced by this very timely article above.

Effective and efficient managers KNOW how to MEASURE and MONITOR (the latter with the aim of making changes to get back on the right track) WHAT IS IMPORTANT -- always!

Anything else ... our so-called managers and administrators, the political directorate ESPECIALLY, with their usual coterie of partisan acolyte mandarins are perfunctorily, robotically and rhetorically, 'easing down the road', just going through the motions.

November 22, 2013 at 1:35 PM
Anonymous said...

In a world which has over the past twenty five years become "smaller" in terms of all forms of communication (ie travel and exchange of information via the internet) the tourism market has increasingly opened. The upshot is that as new destinations (eg Asia, Mexico) have become more available, vacationers seek out new places to visit, whilst too many of the Caribbean venues expect them to accept an 80's standard of hospitality and an increasingly violent way of life.

My advice is to move with the times, because the times won't move with you.....

November 22, 2013 at 3:05 PM
Anonymous said...

Florida is a much better value

November 22, 2013 at 5:28 PM
Anonymous said...

Value.....where is the value? Did the hotel owners pay for the Pitons? Then why make us pay. Hotels are far too expensive in St Lucia. Do you realise the beaches in the Bahamas white sand and are nicer and the accomodations cheaper. Couple that with the fact that airfare is less and guess what? You lose. See ya!

November 22, 2013 at 5:45 PM
Anonymous said...

There has always been too much emphasis and dependence on tourism. The tourist may not necessarily be able to buy. Some are barely making it. Not all that glitters is gold. The industry has created hustlers, beggars, prostitutes and servants (back to slavery).

November 22, 2013 at 8:06 PM
Anonymous said...

This society has never ever fully embraced tourism as a key economic cylinder or driver for economic and social development.

This has been so, until our usual and uniformed vye-qui-vye approach to signing to, and into international agreements, but this time, the WTO (The World Trade Organization) put our banana industry in the unenviable an INEVITABLE position of coming to terms with the removal and dismantling of the preferential tariff treatment of the banana export. This, happens to be nothing less than a concomitant part of or continued membership, and a dominating factor of the WTO's raison d'etre , mission, and its trade rules.

Having our main economic cylinder, bananas, scuppered by our WTO association, meant that we had to come to the realization of the need to find another export-oriented substitute -- and very quickly.

Without natural resources to speak of, and the development of our human resources and human capital painfully ignored, and not readied for world globalized competition -- up to this very day -- tourism at a very glacial-pace eventually EVOLVED as the stop gap. The Eureka moment finally came!

(Neither the UWP and worse, the SLP, the latter which always seemed to have the more cerebral members of our population within its leadership, did not transition readily to that most obvious but short-term option -- tourism.

Witness the continuous and/or repeated assignment of this key and main driver of the Saint Lucian economy, to junior (and inexperienced) ministers always managing, at best -- by trial and error.)

To grapple firmly with the realism of our situation, this country has to continuously make very careful data-based determinations of which -- in the varied segments of the world's tourism market -- it has a competitive advantage and in which ones it is going to compete.

An inordinate and mere reliance on arrivals numbers per se, as a performance metric charitably put, is simply very wrong-headed.

This country is in dire straits waiting for a turning point and reversal of our fortunes.

What we have been doing has to be jettisoned and replaced with a well-grounded and well-monitored control system of tourism-spend and ESPECIALLY our own national (rather than regional) tourism multiplier metric, together with an eye on our own "carrying capacity" , (the number of tourist visitors per year that can be REASONABLY accommodated -- without a concomitant destruction of the larger tourism product.) predicated on, and DOMINATED by the management of the various rates of return on investment.

November 23, 2013 at 8:14 AM

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