Tobago is not the only Caribbean destination to get suckered into the numbers game. Arrival statistics are all too easy for politicians to manipulate and, in the case of Tobago with its domestic market out of Trinidad, they can be very misleading. Measuring tourism’s success should never be done by the number of arrivals, but rather by the revenue they generate for the host economy.
Obviously your run of the mill domestic tourist staying with friends, or in a rented apartment, is liable to spend considerably less than an international tourist who stays in a full-service resort hotel. That should not in any way devalue the importance of the domestic market, which is an invaluable resource much envied by other Caribbean destinations. Rather it should enhance and promote the value of its international traffic.
As is now widely acknowledged, Tobago’s tourism is horribly constrained by its lack of airlift out of potential source markets, and consequently has long been almost single market-dependent on the UK, from where it gets almost three quarters of its traffic, with only supplemental feed on Condor out of Germany, and from Apollo/Rankin Kuhn out of Scandinavia. The loss of scheduled service on Virgin out of Gatwick is therefore bound to be badly felt.
Put simply, the problem is a lack of political commitment from the central government, as can be witnessed by the revolving door that has produced four ministers of tourism, and an equivalent number of TDC chairmen over the last four years. Despite Tobago’s manifest dependence on tourism, the THA does little better, having stifled one development after another with its foreign land licensing obsession.
The primary source of Tobago’s tourism problems is its paucity of quality accommodation which makes it almost impossible for the airlines, and their tour operating partners, to commercially schedule regular service into the island. If the government is really serious about tourism it needs to mount a structured campaign to attract at least 1,500 more four and five-star hotel rooms into Tobago through which to change the airlift paradigm.
With the IMF’s recent warning still fresh on the front pages of the newspapers, it is surely time for the government to make a public commitment to diversify the economy with a structured development of tourism, not just in Tobago, but also in Trinidad, whose rich cultural patrimony, and extraordinary natural beauty, is just waiting to be developed and promoted. It is also time the THA stopped trying to be tourism half pregnant, and publically embraced an internationally credible development plan for the island.
John Bell