I frequently wonder whether our current national marketing efforts are even remotely geared to taking full advantage of opportunities that arise on a regular basis.
One of the recent classic examples was a two-day seat sale by Canadian low-cost carrier,WestJet. People who had travelled with the carrier before, like myself, received an email flyer.
But those who had not would have almost no idea that they could purchase a return ticket from Toronto to Barbados for as little as CAN$460 (BDS$882), including taxes, for travel between June 1 and October 27.
Surely, this near five-month period is exactly when we want to attract more long-stay visitors, but we appear content to simply let this (and other) incredible opportunities pass by, without even trying to exploit their potential.
The obvious dissemination tool would be the national website but there are many others, like Barbados Facebook pages, TripAdvisor Barbados and Flyer Forums. Within seconds I was able to go to TripAdvisor and post a link. If an individual can so easily do it, why are we not thinking about it from a destination perspective?
Could it be one of the penalties we pay by having an advertising agency and public relations company located so far away from the product, seemingly unable to effectively monitor our markets and respond quickly to these tourism partner initiatives?
Someone asked recently why Barbados has not approached another low=cost carrier, Spirit Airlines. I was sadly unable to offer an informed answer, thinking the only rational reason might be that our tourism planners feared that introducing the airline might dilute traffic carried by American and JetBlue.
I then noticed that Spirit has recently started services from Plattsburg in upper New York State, which calls itself “Montreal’s United States Airport”.
Not surprisingly perhaps, as Canada’s second city is only 55 miles away.
Even their website is in English and French, clearly targeting the quoted 3.8 million population that reside in the greater metropolitan Montreal area.
When interviewing a couple from Quebec, the reasons given for using this facility included the convenience of inexpensive parking, general accessibility, without the hoards, queues and delays they experience in larger gateway airports.
From Spirit’s perspective, they can see the trans-border potential with the added benefit of lower landing fees and other operational costs.
The United States government has recently spent over US$107 million to upgrade the customs and immigration facilities at Champlain, making this crossing the most modern on the entire 5 525-mile border.
And for Canadians tempted to fly out of Plattsburg International, they only have to clear this land crossing once without having to be processed again at the airport.
At this stage, maybe there would not be sufficient volume to fill a non-stop from this area, but if Spirit were granted traffic rights from their hub in Fort Lauderdale to Barbados, it would open up such enormous connecting possibilities. Then it’s only a matter of time before non-stop flights to secondary and developing gateways became viable.
Spirit currently flies to about 50 destination cities, including 12 across the Caribbean. It would be interesting to research if the airline’s arrival within the region has driven greater visitor arrival numbers from the States and exactly where those people originated.
• Adrian Loveridge is a hotelier of four decades’ standing.
