The Caribbean Hotel Tourism Association (CHTA) is exploring options to boost intra-regional travel which is currently still far from pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.
CHTA president Nicola Madden-Greig said on Wednesday that business and leisure travel within the region is estimated to have recovered 30 per cent, which is significantly less than the return to international travel.
“Now that’s quite significant considering that, in terms of international travel, we are probably in the region coming close to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic level. So, we are seeing a major rebound for international travel, but travel within the region is not there as yet,” Madden-Greig said at the CHTA’s Rebuilding Intra-Caribbean Travel, Session 1: Profile of the Intra-Caribbean Traveler and Understanding the Obstacles and Opportunities for Stimulating its Recovery panel discussion, via Zoom.
“We have smaller Caribbean economies and smaller locally-owned businesses that are particularly hard hit by this because a lot of the smaller companies do benefit from intra-Caribbean travel. And we also have our larger countries that depend on regional trade to bolster local economies and sell local goods and services.”
Madden-Greig stressed that the return of more regional travel would stimulate higher local spending and increase trade in local goods and services while boosting government revenues and local economies.
According to the CHTA official, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of domestic and regional travel.
“This stimulated a new kind of travel and that is where we in the Caribbean really need to focus. We have to look at how we in the Caribbean, using the tools and techniques that we have, can really focus on building out our regional travel,” she said.
Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Secretary-General of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO) Neil Walters, who was among speakers at the panel discussion, said that based on low COVID-19 infection rates relative to the rest of the world, intra-regional travel for leisure could be a viable stopgap in a future pandemic or similar period of travel restriction.
Among his suggestions for boosting intra-regional travel were raising the awareness of the regional traveller that an undiscovered experience may lie just a few miles beyond their shores, and promoting travel for culture and heritage to regional visitors, especially in non-traditional travel months.
The CEO noted that CARICOM has agreed to look into reducing taxes on intra-regional travel and added that there must be continued routing adjustments by other carriers in the Caribbean to mitigate against the significant reduction of services by regional airline LIAT.
(AH)
