Among the presents my incredibly thoughtful wife bought me for Christmas was a hardcover, full colour book published by British-based Octopus Publishing Group Limited and entitled 501 Must-Visit Islands.
Thankfully, Barbados is one of them.
It graphically highlights the number of upcoming tourism destinations that many of us perhaps would either not have heard of or considered visiting ten years ago.
The majority offer comparable or, in many cases, superior beaches, azure seas and attractive climatic conditions similar to ours.
While some emerging countries have long seen the economic potential of attracting foreign visitors, the advent of the Internet has changed the dynamics of marketing, enabling even destinations with tiny budgets to disseminate high quality images to anyone who expresses interest.
Of course you need a lot more than the often quoted, sun, sea and sand.
Accessibility can be a critical component.
But new air routes are opening up all the time. Next-generation, smaller capacity aircraft with extended range are gradually reducing flying time from our current main markets and will play an increasingly important role in developing new tourism hotspots.
Global travellers too are becoming ever more adventurous and discerning.
It therefore is becoming even more critical to decide exactly where Barbados is going from a tourism perspective.
Let me declare that I wholeheartedly support the long delayed concept of a white paper to give every player within the industry some sort of guidelines so that they can at least try and formulate middle- to long-term strategies.
The Ministry of Tourism carries outlined criteria on its website and on around November 20, 2010, a blog went live to encourage feedback from Barbadians and the Diaspora.
Two town hall meetings have already been held and a couple more will take place later this month. These have been reasonably well advertised on radio, through the Barbados Government Information Service and in the print media, and in fairness it’s difficult to say what more the ministry could do.
The phrase “tourism is our business” lingers on, but despite the often heralded importance of the industry, at the time of writing this column, only seven people outside the administration of the site have posted their comments on the blog.
At times you get the impression that just about everybody has an opinion of what the Barbados Tourism Authority and Minister of Tourism should be doing.
Somewhere between 12 000 and 13 000 people are employed directly in tourism on Barbados, but only seven persons feel the imperative to express their opinion.
Unless this radically changes and the ministry receives representative feedback from all sectors of industry, then the private sector will have scant justification to complain about decisions that are finally drafted and implemented.
Last week the retired diplomat, Peter Laurie, wrote an interesting column entitled Tourism Master Plan which contains, at first glance, some rather extreme suggestions. While personally not necessarily agreeing with all of them, I found it very refreshing that a person of Mr Laurie’s stature and proven ability was questioning the reasons we do things.
Hopefully Mr Laurie and others will share these thoughts on the White Paper Blog.
