[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n February, when the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) presented its Caribbean Tourism Performance Report for 2017, the twenty-one members recorded over 30 million visitors and price-tagged visitor spend at US$37billion. In the latter half of the year some islands were ravaged repeatedly by deadly hurricanes slowing progress in the region but not preventing unprecedented numbers in 2017.
However, while the Caribbean sells hundreds of beaches and island tours to international tourists, natives tend to choose destinations outside of the Caribbean for vacation. Interregional Caribbean travel, however, represents a massive low-hanging fruit that Caribbean governments should pay closer attention to.
Corporate communications officer for LIAT Airways, Shavar Maloney, reported this November that over the past ten years interregional travel has dropped about 30%. The leading factor for this, according to Maloney, is the 50% increase in Caribbean government taxes and fees compared to the airline’s 10% increase in base fares during the same ten-year period.
The most mobile tourism segment is the millennial traveller who wants to experience something different from their island home, another contributor to decreasing interregional travel. However, it is possible that the region has not done enough in highlighting the breadth of diversity and unique offerings that each individual Caribbean island can offer. Below, we consider what else can be done.
As much as the rest of the world sees the Caribbean as one place, and the phrase has unfortunately become cliché, the Caribbean islands truly all have something different to offer aside from the common denominator attractions. According to Trip Advisor’s recently published travel trends, the Caribbean’s main markets within the US and UK still look for culinary and water activities, but the fastest growing experiences globally are historical and heritage tours showing a 125% increase in 2017. This is a tourism product that can easily be incubated in the Caribbean and marketed to other islands. Because of its colonial past, the history of each island in the Caribbean Sea is intricately tied to a different European country. So, from one island to another there is still a lot to experience, like the Louvre pyramid mimicked in Saint Lucia’s Pointe Seraphine or the Liberty Bell look-alike in St. Thomas, to get a glimpse of Europe or the United States.
Even the geographical features of each Caribbean island can be remarkably different from one another. Hiking tours are as popular in Saint Lucia as the beaches, while the island also has its autograph Pitons and steaming hot Sulphur Springs. Similarly, Barbados has the Harrison Caves and the Barbados Atlantis Submarines attractions that are not found in Antigua and Barbuda, which has Stingray City and unrivalled pink sand beaches, or Trinidad, which has Caroni Bird Sanctuary.
It’s also a way to share different ideas for tourism within the region. For example, spotting one sugar mill every few miles and knowing your island’s independence date is a lot different from walking through the historical town of Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas which has colonial Danish buildings from as early as the 1600s for everyday use like housing government offices. Earlier this year, this newspaper reported the watershed research that took place in Saint Lucia on the island’s Amerindian petroglyphs which could one day create an entirely new avenue for tourism. As an example of how this type of cultural Caribbean tourism can work, St. John has already mass-produced jewellery and other keepsakes marked with the island’s signature petroglyphs for sale to locals and tourists alike.
And if there’s one thing that Caribbean people love, it’s Carnival. While each island markets separately, each festival is at a different time of year. Selling one product may not be a bad thing. The Lieutenant Governor in the US Virgin Islands remains steadfast in his suggestion of a regional product for the festival: “Some people may be able to come to one and not the other but may not know about the other one. So it might be an idea worth taking up where the individual committees from the different islands or the different countries decide to do a marketing package surrounding Carnival.”
Last year’s hurricane season highlighted the fragility of the region and its tourism industry. Different governments have emphasized that we underestimate the significance of travel within the Caribbean, but understanding the challenges the region faces together might be what boosts an interregional market. In other words, West Indian travellers are simply more tolerable of hurricane-damaged conditions than international tourists.
LIAT recorded a drop from 1.3 million travellers to just fewer than 800,000 in the Eastern Caribbean sub-region. But the new flights opened last year, such as from Antigua to St. Thomas, were by November fully booked from December to March 2019 with customers coming from St. Kitts, Saint Lucia and Barbados. The reason, according to USVI tourism commissioner, Beverly Nicholson-Doty: “LIAT doesn’t just connect visitors to our territory or vacationers, it connects families. And so people are able to come to the territory to visit friends and family but also the reverse.”
In the European Union it’s easy to hop from one country to the next because of cheaper fares and the lack of border controls within its region. “People say [the EU] economies are scaled but there are combined 5 million people in the English-speaking Caribbean which is a significant number for an airline to benefit from if it were cheaper to travel,” said Maloney, “It’ll take will power from all our Caribbean governments to say interregional travel is important. The integration of the region is important.”
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