Caribbean Tourism Organization

CARIBBEAN TOURISMASSOCIATION tries in the Caribbean but, cumulatively, if we pool the resources to market the Caribbean brand effectively, that gives us the best chance we’ll ever have to cut through the global clutter. “Perception is another major challenge. Last year, when two category five hurricanes came through the Caribbean, 25 to 30 percent of our countries were affected. But information in the public domain wasn’t making that clear enough. People overseas got the impression that the whole region was affected and the Caribbean was to be avoided. Sometimes people forget that a natural disaster is also an image disas- ter. If we created the funding mechanism to allow us to market the Caribbean effectively, the last thing a country in recovery would have to worry about is finding the money to repair the image created by a disaster.We don’t do a good enough job, ourselves, to get the word out about the geography of the Caribbean and the special relationship among our countries. “People don’t understand that the population of the Caribbean is bigger than that of Cana- da, and we’re spread out over a million square miles of territory. During Hurricane Maria, Rag- ged Island in the Bahamas was compulsorily evacuated by the government, yet people in Nassau barely new it happened because there is 100,000 sq. miles in the Bahamas, alone.” BVC: How do you market the Caribbean as a destination, post-hurricanes? Riley: “We, the CTO, have a joint venture with a private sector organization, CHTA (Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association). That public-pri- vate partnership just launched a campaign HUGH RILEY CTO SECRETARY GENERAL AND CEO called ‘The Rhythm Never Stops’– based on the fact that you come to the Caribbean to find your rhythm. Nothing really stops us. One of the things we’ve learned in the last while is that we can handle the sensitivity of how to say which countries are open for business, which are not, and which are on the road to recovery. “Those sensitivities are handled quite neatly when the affected countries tell the rest of the Caribbean, ‘We know what we need to do to recover.While we do that, please do what you can to get and keep the business here in the Caribbean.’ That happened to a huge extent last fall. If you look at the arrival numbers, a lot of non-affected coun- tries saw increases in business for the first part of 2018, although, the deficit created by the affected countries was also very strong because they’ve lost room stock and momentum and it takes time to rebuild. So, it will be an absolute challenge by Dec. 31, this year, to meet that 30 million arrivals mark we hit in 2017.” BVC: How will the CTO continue to be a viable voice for members over the next five years? Riley: “Just recently, the CTO’s State of the Tourism Industry Conference (SOTIC) at Paradise Island, Bahamas featured a key session on ‘Modernizing the Experience: Using Technology to Enhance the Visitor Experience.’ The discussion covered a broad range of applications from customer-centric hospitality models leveraging tech- nology, to the way industry leaders are using mobile and virtual reality inno- vations to differentiate brand identity. In the coming months, the CTO will