There was something surreal about the whole scene.
Outside, in Carlisle Bay, the tide was so low that half a dozen youngsters standing on surfboards and armed only with paddles slid lazily over the glassy surface of the sea and past the pier of the Radisson Aquatica Resort, like transported Venetian gondoliers whose curved craft had somehow been flattened by the journey.
Other youngsters manned little dinghies with sails, learning the sailor’s craft on the mildest of oceans. Carlisle Bay, so entirely subdued by nature that it seemed to bode no danger to any living creature, gleamed in the morning sunlight, its calm demeanour transfixing all who chanced upon it.
Inside the conference room at the hotel, there was the standard set-up for a Press conference: podium, microphone, head table, screen, and chairs facing the presenters filled by those waiting to receive the message.
But instead of the usual topics talked about at these events, one you don’t hear too much about at this formal institutional level had finally, it seemed, made the lofty ascent.
The message was the massage.
Relaxation
Swedish, Thai, Indian. And how the Caribbean, with a few famous exceptions, was losing out on its share of a massive market, when its name and destination were, ironically, synonymous with relaxation.
There was the report of the consultant. Some fly-by-night outfit we had never heard of? No. The consultant was the University of the West Indies, which (who knew?) had created a Health and Wellness Standards Consultancy Team. Its chief consultant, Dr Damien Cohall, gave an outline of the industry standards envisioned for spa and wellness entities in CARIFORUM countries.
The Caribbean Development Bank and UK Aid (“from the Department for International Development”) are also involved in the initiative.
And if you haven’t heard enough name-dropping of bigwig agencies, well, the executing one for this whole effort to lift the “spa and wellness” sector to new heights is the Caribbean Export Development Agency, whose executive director, Pamela Coke-Hamilton, was also present.
You can see why they don’t call it massage anymore.
That word can take you down all kinds of bumpy roads you wished you had never travelled, often with sad, but sometimes (I have heard), happy endings. (Sorry, it was impossible to resist.)
See, it is hard to remain serious when you use that term. So, we must go with “spa and wellness”.
That’s why the whole scene, both outside and inside of that hotel the other morning, was surreal. I felt I had entered a time warp and stumbled into a parallel Barbados.
Caribbean Export’s David Gomez, who is the agency’s trade and export development manager, attempted to put the sector into context.
Currently, over 3 000 women in the Caribbean work in the spa and wellness sector, he said. That translated to a similar number of families who derived economic benefit from it.
Gomez noted that apart from Sandy Lane Hotel’s spa and a few in St Lucia, which are top class, most of the region’s spa and wellness facilities were not purpose-built and were not designed to meet any official standards. There was no regional certification for professionals and not enough training to allow many of the practitioners to move beyond “backrubs”.
This sector, in dire need of uplift, was an alternative to the main entrepreneurial activity for self-employed women in the region, which was the business of selling food, he said.
Speaking of uplifts, a distinction was made between the pedicures, manicures and facials offered in the sector and the medical treatments, including the use of products like botox, offered by medical facilities. But Gomez said the region needed regulation to draw the legal line between the two.
It was all about empowering women to build a better economic future for themselves, he said, adding that the mission was to make the Caribbean a global leader in the spa and wellness sector by 2030.
One of the first steps, he said, was to get people who operated in the sector informally to go the formal route in order to be more attractive to banks for loans.
Speaking to some of the leading people in the local sector, I learned that it was they who had been calling for this focus on their industry for a long time and it was they who had provided much of the information to the consultants, and had been generally lobbying governments to help them move to a higher level.
Upmarket service
Soothing Touch’s Steve Andrews agreed (in response to my perhaps slightly cynical enquiry) that there was a negative connotation to the sector which would always be associated with it. It was still there in places like Thailand, which is a world leader in the legitimate and upmarket side of the industry.
Activities such as those envisioned which would help the legitimate practitioners to fully develop their potential and take the industry to new heights, he said.
The beauty of it was that the visitors who were already coming would spend more on spa and wellness services if the industry was better developed and offered more to its customers, he said.
This reminded me of what Ralph Taylor told me recently when we were talking about tourism. He said that Caribbean countries were among the worst performers (my words, not his) in relieving visitors of cash legitimately through opportunities to purchase additional goods and services when they are amongst us. Other countries are much, much better at it, he said, and we were losing out on revenue as a result.
It turns out that one of the economic sectors we have that can be developed fairly quickly for the benefit of thousands of people across the region is “spa and wellness”.
But I’m still not sure which was more strange, those transported gondoliers sliding over a glassy sea, or highly-paid technocrats talking about the (economic) joys of massage.
