‘Raise service standards’ to compete globally – Symmonds

Barbados must urgently embrace a “standards economy” if it is to compete with rival destinations for foreign exchange, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kerrie Symmonds told Parliament on Tuesday, warning that success in tourism and services depends on meeting world-class benchmarks.

As the House of Assembly debated the Tourist Accommodation Bill, which seeks to regulate online rental booking platforms, Symmonds suggested that raising standards to “world-class” levels was a necessary step to ensuring this island’s offerings could enter the international market and earn much-needed foreign exchange.

“Ideally,’ he told lawmakers, “there should be standards in commerce which enable us, irrespective of whether you are the lowly hairdresser/ cosmetologist or the very upper class contractor doing multi-million dollar projects or the hotelier, doing those things that they do at world class standards, because it is only through doing it at world class standards that we are able then to lift our experience together, we lift our business acumen together, and then we are in a position to move the services that we provide outside of Barbados and into the wider region, and hopefully by extension into the wider world. That is how the foreign exchange is earned.

“If you are to earn the foreign exchange by way of services, you have to do so at a level that allows other countries not to stand in the way of you entering their market, or competing successfully in the market by raising standards issues against you.”

The senior minister stated that through the new legislation, service providers would be pushed towards a higher level by focusing on vital areas such as the value placed on consumer experiences.

Symmonds underscored the role of the Barbados Tourism Product Authority in helping service providers reach this achievement by guiding them in how to make their product better and by conducting inspections to enable them to deliver these higher standards.

It is through these improvements, he said, that additional business generation would be created, empowering Barbadians not only as property owners, but as business operators.

Noting the call earlier in the debate from Leader of the Opposition Ralph Thorne for concessions to be offered to rum shops frequented by tourists, the MP for St James Central said: “You can only benefit from concessions in tourism if the majority of the money that you’re making is as a direct result of tourism offerings.

“So you have to be showing that the surpluses, the money, the real money that you’re making [is] coming from tourists. Which rum shop in Barbados primarily makes its earnings off of tourists? The rum shop, sir, is an ordinary commercial business with tourists, but if we did that, we would then have to open the gates. Every supermarket would be saying, ‘Well, we are a tourism business, so we are entitled to tourism concessions’, and every gas station.”

(JB)