Tourism leader urges a single travel policy for region’s survival

One of the Caribbean’s most influential tourism policymakers has outlined a major recovery plan for the struggling tourism industry, including a common travel protocol in the region.

And it appears that some of the recommendations for more seamless travel for Caribbean people in their own regional community have found support from Barbados’ top tourism official.

Minister of Tourism in Jamaica Edmund Bartlett issued an impassioned plea last Friday, stating that a prolonged fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic could spell disaster for the Caribbean’s tourism product, which experts say could shrink by as much as 30 per cent as a result of a 75 per cent slump in tourist arrivals this year.

Bartlett, the co-chair of the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre, said a “timely recovery” of the sector was crucial to the region’s overall economic stability.

He said: “The socio-economic fallout from any prolonged disruption to the tourism sector may likely produce dire consequences for the Caribbean.”

Stressing that it was critical for Caribbean destinations to “move quickly” with a cohesive plan to ensure the sector’s recovery, Bartlett said it will require a comprehensive plan that will incorporate more synchronised protocol arrangements, more investments in technology, training and development of the human capital and even changes to air services agreements.

Bartlett said: “There is an urgent need, and I will put that as number one on the recovery chart, to enable a more cohesive and a more aligned set of protocols that the market can relate to and our partners can deal with,” said Bartlett, who added that training and development was a “big area” to focus on.

“The demand for the new tourism is going to be different from what we experienced pre-COVID. There is going to be a greater dependence on technology to drive a number of the experiences in the region, and there is going to be a lot more reliance on health standards, and more importantly, a lot more reliance on touchless technology at our airports to ensure a more seamless entry as well as in our hotels and attractions across the region.”

Pointing out that health and environmental security will be critical over the coming months, he said those were areas that would require new investments.

Bartlett said with a focus on security, safety and seamlessness, there were “new and innovative” steps that must now be taken to make the region ready to welcome a lot more visitors during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The collaboration that the region requires for recovery is going to be at a level like we have never seen before,” he said. “We are going to have to look at how do we avoid competitiveness in the traditional sense where we are all fighting each other to show who is able to do more, but to get to a point where we recognise that the Caribbean has to be seen now as an integrated region where we collaborate and share our resources and market ourselves in a multi-destination way.”

He also suggested that authorities look at the possibility of a “single Caribbean passport that allows entry everywhere”. He did not indicate how this proposed passport would differ from the CARICOM passport currently used by the bloc’s member countries for all their citizens but appeared to refer to the countries’ entry policies for CARICOM nationals.

Bartlett also alluded to a single CARICOM airspace, which existed briefly for the staging of the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2007. Despite region-wide praise for the success of its implementation, CARICOM leaders have yet to agree on its permanent introduction. A CARICOM “open skies” agreement is also in force and nationals are entitled a minimum six-month stay in member countries, apart from freedom of movement for skilled workers in the CARICOM Single Market (CSME).

But critics have pointed to uneven enforcement of the regional policies by recalcitrant governments and rogue immigration officers.

“Can we find a single visa regime that allows us to land in Jamaica and to move as domestic into Barbados, Trinidad… Can we find a situation where we rationalise our airspace where a single fee is paid to enable airlines to move through with a lower cost for bringing visitors into our region?” he said.

While it is estimated that the tourism industry could take another three to four years to fully recover, Bartlett said he believed if the measures he outlined were adopted then recovery “perhaps will be shorter”.

Before the pandemic, some 16 Caribbean economies depended primarily on tourism, making the Caribbean the most tourism-dependent region in the world.

The tourism industry contributed some $118 billion (US$59 billion) to the region’s gross domestic product last year, and is said to provide direct employment of just over 430,000 people, or about 18.1 per cent of total employment in the Caribbean.

Minister of Tourism Senator Lisa Cummins agreed there was a need for greater collaboration among regional destinations, pointing out that the pandemic has had a significant quantitative and qualitative impact on the sector and the standard of living across the region.

Acknowledging that travel restrictions have been varied across regional destinations, Senator Cummins said it would help to examine their impact.

She said: “One of the first items on the agenda for us as a region ought to be the identification for the purpose of air travel, and then ultimately when the cruise industry resumes, of harmonisation across our travel protocols.”

“We also have to look at the collaborations that are necessary across our agencies… There also needs to be a significant effort for us to increase consumer confidence,” said Senator Cummins, who pointed out that some air transport partners have been “preying on the fact that there are different protocols across the region”.

“I would welcome the day across the region where we are able to have joint marketing in the same way the cruise industry comes on a seven-day and fourteen-day itinerary and persons travel by sea to one or more destinations. We would want to welcome, across the region, joint collaboration which promotes seamless travel across the Caribbean to experience multiple levels of Caribbean authenticity . . . We think this is very much the time,” said Senator Cummins.

She also pointed to the need for regional economies to ramp up agriculture and manufacturing production to support tourism and the wider economy. (MM)