Minister of Tourism Senator Lisa Cummins is promising a more targeted approach to the marketing of the island’s tourism offerings.
She gave the assurance on Tuesday as she was joined by other Ministry officials and representatives from the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI) at Marizayra’s Sanctuary in Harrismith, St Philip, as they continued their island wide outreach programme.
The meet-and-great initiative is designed to allow officials to get familiar with the products and services on offer in the sector, in an effort to better market them to both locals and visitors as well as come up with solutions to businesses’ concerns.
Following a tour of the location, an impressed Cummins said: “We want to be able to provide support through the BTMI so that this can be marketed. There is already a number of hotels, particularly those on the eastern coast, who send visitors here, and some on the southern coast as well. We want to be able to make sure that we are able to sell Barbadian authenticity and we are able to sell community product.”
She said a part of the plan was to segment the island’s “mass tourism product” and do better targeted marketing of each.
“We have the millennials who are interested in single-snap opportunities and they want to get the adventure tours; you have the children who are looking for specific things; you have your education tourism . . .; there are also the eco-tourists and it is a significant global market segment,” explained Cummins.
The Tourism Minister said the BTMI has already started to provide a range of support by way of marketing and business card development so they could add establishments “to the list of attractions that we will be offering to our cruise passengers, to our long-stay passengers, and even our short-stay passengers who are coming and are interested in this kind of product”.
Cummins said she would be ensuring that the tourism sector was used as “a learning opportunity” for children, adding that she would be engaging business development agencies in the coming weeks to look at how they could provide more development support to operators in the industry.
“We want to ensure that . . . we are able to facilitate them in their growth process and then we are able to create large, successful and resilient enterprises. So, those are some of the things that these visits will help us to accomplish,” said Cummins.
She said during the visits so far, it had been observed that some establishments did not have business cards and that was one area in which they would receive assistance.
Operator of Marizayra’s Sanctuary Ryan Inniss said he welcomed the visit and the marketing initiative from the tourism officials, noting that the establishment was especially popular among the children.
Adding that it was a place for knowledge, he said: “We have young persons here who want to be vets. This is the foundation for them to practice their trade here. So that is one of the reasons this was started.”
However, Inniss said the sanctuary, which will be five years old in October, has outgrown its current location and he was in the process of looking for a new home.
He noted that if the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions had gone on for just one more week, he might have had to close the sanctuary “because there was no business happening here at all and the animals still had to be fed every day and we used up all our resources”.
The location employs 12 workers fulltime and about four part-time.
Inniss said since reopening, there has been a tremendous response from locals, with at least 64 people visiting the location per day.
He said what was needed, however, was additional marketing.
“I am still finding some locals who are saying, although we have been around over four years, that they have never heard about it,” he said.
Acting Chief Executive Officer of the BTMI Robert Chase and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism Donna Cadogan insisted that Barbados had a lot more to offer visitors than sun, sea and sand.
They also indicated that while encouraging more locals to partake in the tourism offerings, they would be seeking to get more tourists involved in community tourism.
(marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb)
