Business View Caribbean l Feb 2023

23 24 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 historic sites, and training various personnel, including at the hotel training institute. In the past, we only focused on driving visitor numbers but soon realized that we could have a million people come and have many complaints. Or we can put some money towards solving visitor complaints and have half a million visitors and fewer complaints. Business View Magazine: Could you speak briefly about any infrastructure projects and environmental initiatives in Antigua and Barbuda? Minister Fernanadez: The environment is critical and is part of our nation’s ten-year vision with a focus on sustainability. Personally, if my great grandchildren find Antigua better than it is now, I would say I was successful. So, our core environmental mission is to keep our environment as pristine as possible and improve upon it too. The ministry is also involved in several green initiatives, one of which won an award last year. Another initiative, in partnership with UNEP, is the Green Fins Program, which focuses on ensuring that snorkel and dive operations adopt environmental best practices. We are also working with various partners to regrow our reefs through a replanting system around Antigua. On the hotel side, we have a team that works with hotels and land-based tour operators to implement green best practices into their operations. All of these initiatives have established Antigua and Barbuda as an emerging sustainable tourism destination, for which we won an award from Lonely Planet, something as a ministry we are very proud of. Business View Magazine: You’ve set up offices in Miami, Toronto, and the UK to help spread the word about your country. Could you provide a brief synopsis of how those marketing efforts are going? essential stakeholders in the tourism industry. We also have a very close relationship with the hotel association and have developed a disaster preparedness manual in partnership with them and other stakeholders. After the hurricane in 2017, we set up a disaster committee, which came up with the manual and associated training. On the Disaster Preparedness Committee, we have someone from the Army, the Red Cross, the Ministry of Health, and other vital entities. If there’s an emergency, we have trained personnel to handle it as best as possible. The other aspect we handle as the tourism authority is marketing, where we allocate a certain amount of the funds that come in through levies to market the country. However, we have gone beyond just marketing, like we traditionally did. We take a percentage of marketing funds and invest locally to improve areas like signage, cleaning up ANT IGUA MINI STRY OF TOUR I SM & INVESTMENT