64 July 2015 - Business View Caribbean
tion’s page by itself and the other half went to individ-
ual hotels’ pages. We’re not a booking agent and we’re
not looking to compete with those folks that already
have their own booking agents, but what we do want to
do is drive leads there. When somebody does a search
for Caribbean travel, they’re going to come to our site.
The next phase of that project is to create more and
drive more traffic to the site by virtue of a paper-click
campaign, as well as advertising that drives people to
CaribbeanTravel.com. We recognize that people have
other options, other islands and other beautiful des-
tinations around the world where people can go that
are as exotic as the Caribbean, but we certainly want
to make sure that we take advantage of being so close
to the mainland U.S. and our biggest market, which is
South America.
BV: You mentioned members that were non-hotels –
do you have a particular segment that’s grown the
fastest? What do a majority of those entities tend to
look like?
VASSER:
When you get into those other segments
you’ve got the attractions, which can be anything
from a zip-line company to a water park. They’re very
diverse in what they offer. I think the strongest seg-
ment we can go after to represent and we can provide
value for is the restaurant industry. I don’t have to tell
you, being in the industry, culinary tours, the growth
of things like the Food Network and the spotlight it’s
putting on individual chefs, individual restaurants and
cuisines. What I’ve been amazed at so far is that you
go to 33 different islands, and these are individual
countries, everybody does breakfast different and I
think we need to celebrate that. What we can do is
do the same thing that we’ve done for hotels. I also
think a segment that we really could make an impact
on is small meetings, getting into the incentive market
more, getting into those small corporate meetings and
resorts, that’s what we can bring to the table. I think
it’s restaurants and the culinary segment that’s really
going to take us to the next level.
BV: Are there certain issues that are on the minds of
the members? Obviously, coming out of the reces-
sion and getting themselves back to stability are
huge for the ones that have made it through, but are
there any other things that are pressing issues to
the group as a whole?
VASSER:
As you can imagine, 33 different countries,
there are 33 major issues facing all of them. Collec-
tively, energy costs are a huge issue that we need to
face as a region. You think about individual islands,
what it costs to generate electricity, water. A lot of
the infrastructure that we take for granted here in
the mainland U.S. with the grid system – they don’t
have that there. They don’t have the critical mass that
drives energy costs down. The cost per kilowatt-hour
there is significantly different than what you would pay
