Why is Tobago (far more so than Trinidad), an island of real beauty and potential to attract visitors, failing to earn a significant share of a growing world and Caribbean tourism industry? What is it that is preventing an island that is said to register above average in the indices by which a tourism destination is judged, has so consistently fallen away in attracting visitors to share in the beauty and culture of the island?
The figures tell the story: in 2005 there were 88,000 foreign arrivals in Tobago, the figure has declined consistently over the 11-year period to a mere 19,000 foreign visitors to Tobago in 2016. While this dramatic decline has occurred in Tobago, destinations such as the Turks and Caicos Islands, Belize, Cuba, and Guyana registered double digit growth in arrivals in 2016.
One response to the question is that we, in T&T, who thought the energy industry would always support a comfortable, even luxurious lifestyle for significant portions of the populations, have never truly considered and sought to understand tourism, one of the most buoyant and largest industries in the world.
My wondering on this failure to develop tourism in Tobago and Trinidad was triggered by the release by the Caribbean Tourism Organisation of data on the performance of regional tourism in 2016. The report includes data from Caricom and the wider French, Dutch and Spanish-speaking region.
Globally, international tourism arrivals grew in 2016 to 1.2 billion travellers, a 3.9 per cent increase, one million more visitors than the figure for 2015; the arrivals in the Caribbean in 2016 increased by 4.2 per cent to an estimated 29.3 million. And while tourism destinations such as the Dominican Republic, Antigua, Barbados, Cuba and Turks and Caicos, Guyana, Grenada, Bermuda and others did exceptionally well in 2016, T&T experienced an overall seven-per-cent decline in 2016, the figures include cruise ship and stop-over arrivals, states the CTO.
Visitors to the Caribbean spent US$35 billion in 2016. A fully developed tourism economy in Tobago and Trinidad could surely earn significant chunks of forex for T&T. Moreover, the linkages that tourism makes in an economy from the airline ticket to the bene balls and doubles vendors spread the tourist dollar all around.
With respect to benefiting from the US tourism dollar, T&T with its manufacturing and agricultural sectors, its education base that produces from managers to people at lower levels of the service industry is far better placed than say the Bahamas, which expatriates some 85 cents of each dollar it receives from tourism. The T&T tourism industry has the ability to keep 70 cents out of every dollar from visitor spend.
Compared to many other island/destinations in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, the latter in particular, has a far more naturally attractive and diversified geography. However, compared to other destinations, they far outstrip T&T in planning to earn large chunks of the US$35 billion to improve the quality of life for their citizens.
So what’s the problem? First, it has to do with the failure of succeeding governments to give serious consideration to tourism as an industry and a major foreign exchange earner, says Chris James, chairman of the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association.
Undoubtedly there remain strains of our colonial past which suggest tourism to be a subservient, crawling on hands and knees, genuflection to white foreign tourists. It is also reality that whereas we as a society and economy have had the energy industry with high international prices as a gift without too much effort outside the work done by a narrow group of technocrats and government decision makers, we find it difficult to contemplate and undertake the kind of planning and work effort required to make a success of tourism.
The private sector, with the Government providing facilitation, should be out front with the effort to develop tourism.
Unconsciousness of the potential of tourism, says Chris James, shows itself in “the lack of destination marketing” to raise the profile of Tobago.
In addition to the need for destination marketing, the CTO report identifies “greater air access from the source markets to the region, the realisation of significant investments to enhanced infrastructure (airport redevelopment in St Maarten and Bermuda) and product (hotels including Courtyard by Marriott in Jamaica in April of 2016 and Four Seasons in Anguilla in October 2016) and improved marketing,” as reasons for the success of Caribbean destinations.
James notes that outside of CAL, Tobago is not served directly by the international airlines; the island gets what falls off the table of the major Caricom destinations, including St Lucia, Barbados, and Antigua.
In the middle of the Carnival season, the number of visitors to the festival is said to be falling. We have argued and cussed out about our historical and cultural diversity of religion, foods, musics and more instead of making use of them to attract visitors. And what of this golden egg that is Carnival?
This 200-year old festival in which we have an historical advantage, one that derives from developing original products which can be imitated in dozens of carnivals around the world but hardly duplicated for the authenticity nurtured and developed over the period of time, has not been fully developed as a tourism product.
As well exemplified this year, the organisation of the festival is dominated by conflict amongst the interest groups instead of a focus on the benefits that can be derived. To be continued.
