Allen Chastanet, chairman of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation, says Caribbean tourism is lagging the world market's.

Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO) chairman Allen Chastanet says despite conditions in the international travel market favouring growth, the Caribbean's share of the world market is in decline.

In an address to the opening of the 11th annual Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Investment conference at the World Trade Center in Willemstad, Curaçao Tuesday, Chastanet said the region still represented only 7.0 per cent of the world market share.

"There are some islands that have done better but on an average the region has not kept pace with world tourism growth, so our share of the market continues to decline," he said.

CTO statistics to 2004 shows average growth in regional tourism arrivals of 7.1 per cent compared to world growth of 10.7 per cent.

That year, tourism expenditures in the the Caribbean grew 7.9 per cent to top US$21.6 billion.

In 2003, the situation was entirely reversed. While the Caribbean's growth was steady at 7.2 per cent - expenditures were just over US$20 billion - the world market had dipped by 1.5 per cent.

Chastanet, who was in January this year sworn in as St. Lucia's Tourism Minister, noted that this decline remained despite Asian tsunami two years ago, the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, a major Hurricane in Cancun, Mexico, and now an open skies agreement between Europe and the United States, from which the Caribbean stood to benefit.

Hurt the Caribbean

The EU-U.S. agreement was initially expected to hurt the Caribbean, with expectations that vacationers who might have been eyeing the region, would be enticed to travel to either Europe or the U.S.A.

But, now Chastanet, who was an airline marketing executive with Air Jamaica prior to his segue into the hotel sector in St Lucia, says he anticipates that changing landscape would put pressure on the legacy carriers, resulting in a shift from Europe to the Caribbean.

"Part of that will also be stimulated by the weak dollar and, looking at forward trends, it is not expected that the dollar is going to be strengthened in the next two to three years," he said.

"But ultimately it means that with strong European currencies and improved air access, an opportunity is presented for countries that depended strictly on the U.S. market to start diversifying while for others the U.S. will become an even bigger market."

But Chastanet also cited the need for "structural changes" within Caribbean markets, noting that it would be to their demise if they failed to acknowledge and address their deficiencies and the effect those were having on productivity and sustainability of the regional product.

"More and more destinations are recognising what tourism brings to the table as it provides the basic infrastructure for an industry to grow," he said.

Work on the linkages

"We need to work on the linkages through agriculture and entrepreneurs, and promoting your entertainers, and get involved in the new types of investment through real estate where persons can see the destination as secondary homes."

He later told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) that the conference provided an opportunity to help build the confidence of the region through meetings with key private sector players the hotel chains, the bank institutions, the development corporations who would all share and assess where the Caribbean was at and how it could be successful.

"While the Caribbean may not have been fulfilling its true potential," he said, "there is more recognition of what we need to do, and therefore, the potential for the growth of our destinations is clearly there."

- CMC