The Obama administration said last week it will allow individual travelers to take "people-to-people educational" trips to Cuba without an authorized group. Tom Popper, the president of Insight Cuba, which provides people-to-people travel to Cuba for Americans, talked to News Editor Johanna Jainchill about the potential impact of the new rule on existing people-to-people tours and why Obama may want airlines and hotels to do business on the island.
Q: What do these changes mean for your business?
Tom Popper
A: What we've seen so far is really a positive impact. Every time people considering travel to Cuba see the travel restrictions ease, they get more comfortable with the notion of traveling to Cuba while it's still regulated. ... There's a monster industry surrounding guided tours to Paris or Italy or wherever it may be. The market doesn't change as far as that goes. The average age of our passengers is 63 years old. They are less interested in figuring out all of the trials and tribulations of travel to Cuba, or anywhere for that matter.
Q: Does this open opportunities to help create itineraries for individual travelers?
A: We're in the process of developing a VIP product for couples or very small groups that want to travel to Cuba and take advantage of the services we provide and unique places we visit and the people we meet with. [The changes] expedite the urgency of creating this particular product.
The difficulty has always been the cost of doing a small group. Fixed costs based on the regulations were so high. We were required to provide a Cuban guide, a tour leader, a driver. ... This removes that requirement of having three people.
Q: How can people comply with the regulations, and who is regulating them?
A: [The Office of Foreign Assets Control] is not being clear on that, nor have they ever been. I think they are leaving it up to individuals to decide what's an educational exchange. They are not loosening the restrictions on beach travel, which has always been pretty clear: If you go to a beach resort, you only interact with the staff, no local Cubans, and you're not exposed to any part of society. If you go to Havana and meet with people and some artists and engage in that way, it would probably be sufficient. It's incumbent on the individual travelers to comply, and they will sign an affidavit to that effect.
This will help increase the flow of travelers. But still, the bottleneck remains in the infrastructure in Cuba; the limited hotel space and flights.
[The new change] was anticipated when [Obama] announced that commercial flights would happen in 2016. That was predicated on the fact that a lot of the U.S. carriers said, in order for us to invest in routes to Cuba we need to know that there will be a constant flow of passengers; otherwise it's not going to make a lot of sense for us financially. So once that seemed to come to fruition then the next step was, OK, now we are going to open up [travel restrictions] a little to provide you with passengers.