ORDINARY BARBADIAN CRAFTSPEOPLE and others engaged in indigenous businesses will be given accommodation in an expanded departure section of the Grantley Adams International Airport (GAIA).
Minister of Tourism Kerrie Symmonds gave notice of this yesterday when he opened the $1.2 million lounge to accommodate departing passengers from the home-porting cruise tourism sector.
“The economic democratising of commercial opportunity is an idea whose time has also come, and this departure area must reflect in large measure the traditional Barbados businessman and businesswoman,” Symmonds said in his address to an audience that included stakeholders from the commercial section of the island’s tourism businesses.
“This departure area in large measure must reflect the craft, the culture, the innovation of the Barbadian who is trying to make a little dollar, but who hitherto has been excluded from this airport in the land of his birth because an established commercial interest and an established private sector has tended to be omnipresent at the airport.”
The planned walk-through mall, he added, “will be a mall that is populated by the people of this country; selling in large measure the produce and the productivity of the country and therefore giving the visitors an opportunity to experience something indigenous . . .”. (GC)
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