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Minister of Tourism and International Transport Senator Lisa Cummins has unveiled an ambitious plan to propel the country’s largest industry beyond the traditional focus on visitor arrivals to maximise “the business of tourism” in a more meaningful way.
In tandem with the arrival of visitors, Senator Cummins revealed that her ministry would be seeking to facilitate the monetization of Barbadian products by offering them for sale in key source markets.
During the state of the industry address at the Hilton Barbados Resort on Friday, Senator Cummins explained that the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc’s new board was consistent with an intention to combine traditional tourism strategies with the ministry’s new focus on business.
“There has been a historical conversation around tourism that has been driven entirely by how many planes are on the tarmac, how many people are getting off of those planes on the tarmac and how many people are in our local hotels. We want to challenge Barbados and our stakeholders to go beyond just that and we are calling this ‘the business of tourism’,” said Senator Cummins.
“We have to have a conversation, especially in a post-COVID environment about how to get more from less. So even if we were to exceed our [2019] record year of 1.2 million visitors, what are we trying to extract from that volume and even if we had lower numbers, are we looking at a higher quality of visitor? Are we looking at a longer stay of visitor? Are we looking at monetizing services that don’t require people to move at all?” asked Senator Cummins.
“Are we looking at exporting our goods and services using our traditional source markets and thereby expanding our markets doing the same things? It is the business of tourism that we are developing and we are trying to do it sustainably,” she added.
The tourism minister said the plan, which will be executed over the next two years will require structural reforms that will improve the marketability of businesses that “tell the story of Barbados” and can “connect to our overseas markets”.
“Every tourism business that is connected potentially to an export market, we want to see the possibility of an establishment of a commercial presence in overseas markets,” said Senator Cummins.
“There is no reason why some of our locally-owned hotels cannot then expand their scope and set up a commercial presence in regions, not just here in the Caribbean, but in other sun regions like in the Pacific. We want to be able to preside over that,” she explained.
Senator Cummins said a large retraining exercise would be launched at the tertiary level to retool prospective tourism workers and stakeholders with the new direction.
She said ministry officials are already in talks with international tertiary level institutions about establishing a presence in Barbados and partnering with existing schools.
“That then becomes an expanded economy even further for education tourism. We are no longer only training Barbadians, we are training the region, we’re training the world and people come from around the world, as they do now, for medical training in Barbados, for tourism and hospitality education. This is the business of tourism. It is not just about how many visitors we have had on the island for the year. We are changing the conversation,” said the tourism minister.
She added that reform of the existing Tourism Development legislation with a new Sustainable Tourism Development Act would be critical as part of efforts to improve the ease of doing business to attract investment.
Cummins also underscored the need for a “youth invasion” that will allow the country’s youthful voices to have a voice and a stake in the new direction.
“If our vision is realised, within the next two years, we will have a partnership with BTMI, Export Barbados, Invest Barbados and BTII where tourism investment and market-ready products will create a partnership that people in our source markets can see and buy and book Barbados, because all of the new branding and all of these products that we’re talking about will carry a barcode that will take you to visitbarbados.org, to bookbarbados.com. That will connect you to the entire spectrum of products and services available here in Barbados, your accommodation, car rentals but it will also connect you to products and experiences because those are the things that constitute the business of tourism,” Cummins added. [email protected]
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