THERE WILL BE no Follow Me To Crop Over promotions by the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) this year.
The campaign – which costs $60 000 or more to promote – is an annual event geared at getting a greater number of tourists in the island for the national festival.
However, just one week before the promotion would normally have kicked off in Trinidad for the wrap-up of Carnival, then on to St Lucia for jazz in May and New York for Labour Day in September, chief executive officer of the NCF, Dr Donna Hunte-Cox, is saying the promotion is in “hiatus”.
She told the DAILY NATION the NCF board was doing an evaluation of what went before.
“This year, because we have a new minister and a new board, it’s under review . . . .
“We’re not doing it this year. Any overseas promotion, whether it’s an NCF delegation plus [Barbados Tourism?Authority] or NCF delegation by itself, like last year or not, we are currently reviewing it to see its benefits. So we’re taking a hiatus, basically,” she said.
The NCF chief said the foundation had established a partnership with the BTA, which would be responsible for any overseas promotion of Follow Me To Crop Over.
She could not say whether the brand would remain the same under this arrangement.
“I’m not sure how [the BTA] will brand it, but I know they will be doing any overseas promotion on our behalf. Their mandate is to promote Barbados and activities outside Barbados. That is not our mandate. Before, they took the lead and we went as a partner,” she explained.
The scaled-down promotion suffered a major setback last year as a result of a last-minute pull-out by lead partner the BTA, leaving the NCF to foot the entire bill. It resulted in a smaller delegation to Trinidad and a change in accommodation from the upmarket Hyatt hotel, where the delegation stayed in 2009.
A few months after the promotions to Trinidad and St Lucia last year, then NCF chairman Ken Knight noted that the lack of airlift was undermining the Follow Me To Crop Over promotions in the region.
About 4 000 people were expected from Trinidad and St Lucia for Crop Over last year, but Knight said those numbers could have been considerably higher if the powers that be in tourism and aviation could resolve the airlift problem.
He said airlift capacity had been significantly reduced since BWIA quit several years ago.
“That is where we take our lashes . . . . The market is there, but the airlift is not there,” he said.
Speaking at his first Crop Over Press briefing last month, Minister of Culture Stephen Lashley said the NCF and the BTA were working together to upscale the overseas marketing of Crop Over and that they were also looking at airlift.
“It is important that we get that airlift . . . because once we increase our spend in the area of marketing, it is going to be very clear that we’re going to have increased demand in terms of people who want to come to Barbados,” he said.
Speaking to the DAILY NATION recently, Minister of Tourism Richard Sealy affirmed that the marketing of Crop Over would be taken to another level.
“We’ve commissioned all of our officers in the different markets to come up with their own plan of marketing Crop Over and bring it back, obviously, to Bridgetown . . . but we are very serious about the whole aspect of marketing Crop Over and taking it to another level,” Sealy said.
Please see also today’s DAILY NATION Page 4.