Govt seeks to get long-stay visitors from Welcome Stamp initiative

Government officials behind this country’s bread and butter industry are on a mission to convert the hundreds of Barbados Welcome Stamp remote workers into regular, long-stay visitors.

The announcement was made by Minister of Tourism Senator Lisa Cummins during a news conference yesterday which she shared with Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Abrahams to update the island on the visa programme which allows persons from across the globe to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic in Barbados while working remotely for up to 12 months.

Cummins said the goal of her Ministry, in collaboration with Barbados Tourism Marketing Incorporated (BTMI), is to see how it can convert those applying for the visas into actual visitors, considering that arrivals have all but dried up and hotels are struggling.

“The tourism sector has seen dampened demand, we have reduced airlift coming in, the hotels are struggling with lower than normal occupancy, and we need to ensure we are able to fill the gap in terms of Government revenue and foreign exchange generation,” she said.

“So, what does that mean? It means that we are looking to turn a single long-term Welcome Stamp visitor into a long-term contributor to national development and to national revenue generation.

“What we have been seeing is that there has been a significant number of persons applying out of our traditional source markets. So, our traditional source markets would be those in Europe, those in the United States, North America more generally; and we are seeing the highest number of persons expressing interest in coming to Barbados from those source markets,” the newly-appointed Minister added.

Cummins said her Ministry was therefore assessing all that data to ensure that, through the establishment of facilitating support mechanisms such as a call centre, people can use a dedicated website to interact with Barbados-based teams that are selling the island to them consistently, from start to finish.

“So, the minute you indicate interest . . . we walk you all the way through the process, through things like, where are you going to stay, what are some of the services available to you here in Barbados, where are the schools that are available for you to send your children, because we are also targeting families,” she explained.

“What we are also looking at now is how we are going to further expand the product. We are moving into the second phase of the rollout in the coming two weeks or so, where we are going to be going after specific target markets that are already consistent with the Barbados product as well as identifying new product markets.”

The Tourism Minister explained that there were a number of professions across the globe which were not tied to a location, and she identified “digital nomads” in consulting and other technology-based individuals who were expressing an interest in working remotely from Barbados.

“So, we are going now into the direction of targeting those professional categories, in particular those that coincide with our source markets and our primary areas of activity, particularly where we have overseas offices where we can spend a lot of time partnering with our local entities and getting those persons into Barbados,” she stated.

Senator Cummins added: “We have some companies who are approaching us in the Ministry of Tourism to say that they have teams that are remotely located and they would like to be able to have their teams who are currently limited to a single space to come to Barbados for an extended period of time to be based here.”

“So, it’s not just generic marketing in this instance, but it is dedicated and focused on specific companies that are engaging with us to be able to get their employees, in particular the families of their employees, to work and be based here in Barbados until the situation in their given locations is stabilized.

“The key message that I want to get out there is that this is a signal initiative which indicates that the product that is tourism that we have historically known, has changed, and it has changed forever; and there are different ways in which we will be going about engaging with our traditional partners and identifying new ones and being able to convert new visitors into Barbados who are going to be here not just for a short stint but for a year,” she contended.

Minister Cummins also addressed the issue of programmes that are competing with the Barbados Welcome Stamp.

She told reporters her Ministry was also working closely with its tourism partners, especially those in the overseas offices, to confront this matter head on.

“There are a number of countries that have observed the initiative here and are looking obviously to enter the space as well. And one of the things that we always have to do, which is a key business principle, is to make sure we keep the product fresh, we keep it effective, we are able to deliver what we are selling, we are able to offer people what we have promised them . . . and that is one of the commitments Barbados will be offering,” the Government Senator assured. (EJ)