Winter occupancy shows promise, says BHTA

Tourism officials are upbeat about a promising winter season ahead, and are already outlining plans to address a weak summer 2023 through targeted marketing.

With the industry currently suffering from a lower than usual summer period, Chairman of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) Renée Coppin reported on Friday that the association was in the final stages of developing a two-tiered campaign intended to capture what business it could for the remaining few weeks of the period and drive forward bookings for summer 2023.

“The campaign will utilise bookbarbados.com as the primary conversion mechanism. Our recent Crop Over campaign, which was done in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism and the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. demonstrated how effective this booking engine can be if marketed effectively,” she told the BHTA’s quarterly meeting at the Mount Gay Visitors’ Centre.

“That weekend promotion saw an exponential increase in bookings on the platform and directly for the members involved. We are confident that with the appropriate targeted marketing and messaging we can replicate that success in our planned marketing campaign,” she said.

For July occupancy was 52.7 per cent, reflecting a 19.8 per cent decline when compared to July 2019, the last “normal year” for the industry. Average occupancy for January to July was 61.8 per cent, compared to 72.2 per cent in 2019.

Coppin said: “We are in recovery mode and the most promising sign of that recovery is that our average daily rates are showing positive signs,” she said.

She reported that average daily rates for the year to date have increased by three per cent from $541.49 in 2019 to $609.20 in 2022. However, the revenue per available room, which was impacted by the decline in occupancies, showed a decline of 10.2 per cent, dropping from $439.11 in 2019 to $394.27 in 2022.

However, an upbeat Coppin said the good news was that winter was “looking promising not only in relation to occupancies [but] members are also reporting good booking pace”.

She said while the hotel accommodation segment will continue to limp through summer with a 43 per cent occupancy projected for this month and a 39 per cent for October, “from November we are encouraged by the projections received of 63 per cent.”

“For December, January and February members have respective projections of 58, 57 and 62 per cent. In polling our other accommodation sectors, we see a similarly encouraging trend,” she said.

Pointing to the need for better tracking performance for the villa segment, Coppin said over 30 per cent of them have reported so far and have indicated that occupancy projected were: 35 per cent for October, 55 per cent for November, 54 per cent for December, 59 per cent for January and 64 per cent for February.

“These numbers are higher when we include periods where the villas will be owner-occupied,” she said.

Also reporting on the sharing economy, Coppin said the Barbados Entrepreneurship and Tourism Association membership was seeing encouraging levels of bookings from February to March next year with some being fully booked from November this year to May, mainly with repeat guests.

“They have recorded some cancellations due to the economic challenges in the UK, specifically the falling rate of the pound,” added Coppin.

She also pointed to a promising cruise season, noting that after no business this summer, cruise services provider Foster Ince has indicated that the upcoming winter season should be around 75 per cent of 2019 levels with an estimated 510,000 passengers.

The BHTA chairman said “We have also been utilising their expertise in trying to rally support from government for a cruise programme to again generate summer business to the destination. The idea is to utilise the smaller cruise lines and work with other southern Caribbean destinations to develop a suite of incentives to create summer itineraries that include our islands. We have been advised that, while we are now too late for 2023, there are considerations and efforts being made by the BTMI for summer 2024.”

Newly-selected Chief Executive Officer of the BHTA Geoffrey Roach pointed to lower than usual airlift for the challenging summer reported.

“In comparing the 2022 summer months against those of 2019 we can see clearly that the occupancies are still lagging the 2019 level. We believe that one of the primary reasons for this has been the level of airlift into Barbados when compared to 2019 levels,” he suggested.

“As anticipated, the supply of rooms has returned to 2019 levels as the island has sought to attract business. We observed a fall-off in the supply immediately after the impact of COVID, with a steady increase in room supply through 2020 to the start of the 2021/2022 winter season. This signals that the country is ready to receive business,” he said.