The Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) last month revealed that 2018 tourist arrivals fell by 2.3%, better than the CTO had anticipated considering the extent of damage from the 2017 hurricane season, largely thanks to a record fourth quarter. News editor Johanna Jainchill spoke to CTO secretary general Hugh Riley about a drop-off in U.S. arrivals and why the Caribbean needs a rainy day fund.
Q: U.S. tourism to the Caribbean fell 6.3%. Is that because Americans tend to travel to U.S. territories, and those were among the ones hit by the hurricanes?
Hugh Riley
A: You can't pinpoint one specific reason. It could be a contributing factor because the U.S. is a major supplier of business to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. It's an important factor because Americans don't need a passport to go there. I'd hesitate to suggest it's the only reason: There is evidence to suggest that Americans have diverted from the affected islands and gone to other places. There is every suggestion that Americans aren't as familiar with the geography of the Caribbean as we would like them to be. We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that some American travelers and even some of the trade in the U.S. were unclear about the spatial relationship between countries in the Caribbean and that people in the U.S. said, "the Caribbean was affected, let's not go there right now."
Q: Many Americans struggle with geography. But do you think the trade wasn't educated enough, either?
A: We tried our best, but we need to do a better job of it. We had webinars, face-to-face meetings, we put information out to the trade, but the trade comes from the general population. We know that we as an industry in the Caribbean need to do a better job of educating everybody about the geography and size and nature of the Caribbean. Bahamas is a good example of what I'm talking about here. Ragged Island in the Bahamas was evacuated during one of the hurricanes. The people on Nassau and Paradise Island barely knew that happened because Bahamas occupies 100,000 square miles.
We need to do a better job of helping people understand that the population of the Caribbean is 40 million and it occupies a million square miles.
Q: Are you concerned about any negative branding impact as a result of the ongoing hurricane recovery?
A: There is absolutely no question in our mind about that. A natural disaster is an image disaster, a branding disaster. Rebuilding after any kind of natural disaster includes the process of rebuilding the image. The cost of rebuilding after a hurricane has to include the cost of rebuilding the image. The Caribbean as a region needs to have some kind of contingency plan, a rainy day fund, so that when disaster strikes, while our member countries of the CTO are concerned about rebuilding infrastructure, we should not also have to be wondering about where to get the money to rebuild our image. We need a contingency plan to do that.
Q: Where would that funding come from?
A: The Caribbean Coalition for Tourism, a public-private partnership that focuses on marketing the Caribbean as a brand, put out its first joint regional campaign in many years last year: The Rhythm Never Stops. The Coalition aims to create a mechanism for funding. In the U.S., there is a sustainable funding mechanism in place to market the U.S. overseas. That's where you get the $150 million for Brand USA. You are not scrambling, not lurching from one crisis to another. The Coalition is working toward a sustainable mechanism that keeps the funding flowing. Any country that is as tourism-dependent as most of the countries in the Caribbean are realizes without too much argument that if tourism succeeds, so does the economy. Conversely, if tourism fails, we have to find other ways to make up that shortfall in our economies. There is not a lot of argument about the importance of marketing countries effectively.