Business View Caribbean | May 2019

21 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN MAY 2019 “We’ve worked aggressively to mitigate the impact of the two very significant hurricanes in 2017 by providing developmental assistance to the affected destinations and helping their efforts to recover as quickly as possible. This is a very important point – over 70 percent of the Caribbean was NOT impacted by those storms and continued to be open to tourism, as normal. The public perception is that the entire Caribbean was affected and we had to do a lot of work to counter that. Now, 18 months later, most of those countries and destinations that were affected are back in business and well on the road to recovery. “As a result, we’ve seen some upgraded, and improved, and expanded product. In the past several years, we’ve seen the addition of about 20,000 new hotel rooms in the Caribbean and we expect another 10-12 thousand added this year, plus there are quite a few on the books. We’ve also seen a steady annual increase in upgrades to existing hotels; a lot of investment in capital expenditures, refurbishments, and expansions. In 2019, we’re having one of our best years in terms of additional airlift growth and visitor arrivals, as well as hotel occupancy rates, so we’re in a good place right now.” BVC: How are you encouraging hurricane-wary tourists to come to the Caribbean? Comito: “We, as others, embarked on a series of awareness initiatives. This included ongoing briefings to the media and travel partners. With a number of the destinations, and some major players in the industry, we did a digital and social media marketing and public relations campaign last year around the theme ‘Caribbean: The Rhythm Never Stops’. All of that has helped educate the traveling public about the geography and diversity of experiences in the Caribbean. I like to use a geographic example for understanding the expanse of our region. Basically, the distance from northern Bahamas to Trinidad is the same distance as Boston to Miami Beach. In winter, you can be lying on the beach in Miami, while a blizzard is hitting Boston. The same applies here. When you look at the damage from the 2017 hurricanes, Barbuda was affected in a large way, while its sister island Antigua, was open for business almost immediately after the storms. “The lack of understanding about the geography of the Caribbean is important and we were challenged to get that word out. We did just that. There is a saying in our industry: “tourism is everyone’s business” and that’s even more relevant in the Caribbean because of the extent to which it affects our economies and the lives and livelihood of our people. pictured above CHTA CEO, Frank Comito CAR I BBEAN HOTEL & TOUR I SM ASSOC I AT ION (CHTA)