Main income must be from tourism, says Symmonds

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kerrie Symmonds says Government is working to spread tourism benefits to all Barbadians, but this does not mean everyone who provides service to a visitor can get concessions.

He was responding to suggestions from Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne that with community tourism now “the new frontier”, concessions should be offered to more Barbadians, including rum shop operators.

The issue was raised in the post-lunch session of the House of Assembly yesterday during debate on the Tourist Accommodation Bill, 2025.

“You can only benefit from concessions in tourism if that the majority of the money that you are making is as a direct result of tourism offerings,” said the senior minister who previously had responsibility for tourism.

“So you . . . have to be showing that . . .the real money that you making [is] coming from tourists. Which rum shop in Barbados, primarily makes its earnings off of tourists? The rum shop is an ordinary commercial business which tourists go to.

“If we did that, we would then have to open the gate, every supermarket would be saying, ‘Well, we are tourism business, so we [have got] to be entitled to concessions’. Every gas station that got a little sales [shop] inside of it would be saying, ‘Well, tourists does pass through here, so we entitled to tourism concessions’.”

The representative for St James Central said that “if he [Thorne] is going to argue in this Place that you are entitled to tourism concession because you are running a rum shop, then, clearly, every supermarket will [have to] get, every wholesale and retail [business] will [have to] get.

“In fact, the whole country could as well be given tourism concessions. Is that now to pass as economic policy in this country?”

Symmonds said that beyond concessions, Government had introduced policies to help community tourism operators, including those providing accommodation via Airbnb and other shared economy platforms, since taking office in 2018. This included raising the land tax threshold to give property owners an ease, and making it easier for people to access morgages.

He said that in order for the sector and the overall economy to become more competitive there was a need to improve standards.

Symmonds noted that this was the objective of the Tourist Accommodation Bill,which provides for the licensing, classification, designation, registration, regulation, monitoring and inspection of tourist accommodation.

“We have to come to the point where we have a standards economy, that in everything we do there must be a . . . set of standards applied to it.” 

“Ideally, there should be standards in commerce which enable us, irrespective of whether you are the lowly hairdresser, cosmetologist, or the very upper class contractor doing multi-million dollar projects, or the hoteliers, doing those things that they do at world-class standards.

“Because it is only through doing it at world-class standards that we are able then to lift our experience together, we lift our business acumen together, and then we are in a position to move the services that we provide outside of Barbados and into the wider region, and hopefully, by extension, into the wider world. That is how the foreign exchange is earned.”