Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.
By Alessandro Giustolisi
The COVID-19 pandemic has simmered down but Barbados is facing a lot of challenges in regaining its pre-COVID numbers. There was a drastic decline in all aspects of tourism. At the end of 2021, the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI) appointed a new CEO with an “impressive resume”, so much so that some members of the press even considered him the “guru” of tourism. The problem is, when one researches the tourism data, it shows that up until the middle of 2023, Barbados was doing poorly, especially considering all the financial resources the Government has invested during all this time. The ironic thing is that other similar tropical destinations in the world without any appointed guru have shown a better performance than us.
Just before COVID-19 in 2019/20, it stopped flights to Germany which for years was covered by Condor Airlines, having all year-round flights once a week and in the winter additional two flights, all via Tobago or Grenada; and substituted them with a deal with Eurowings (leisure airline part of Lufthansa) that offered flights three times a week, nonstop to Frankfurt. As good as it sounded, this deal blew up in our faces, when we thought that we could have a viable nonstop flight, especially when Barbados alone cannot generate the needed number of passengers to fill frequent weekly flights like those of Eurowings. In retrospect, it would have been better to keep Condor with a stop in another island, where we would have had at least that continual yearly route, than lose our only direct service connection into the European Union for three years.
I was hoping that a German-born BTMI CEO with so much experience could have resolved the Eurowings deal, creating better conditions with them, but instead, they decided to use their aeroplanes in the US market where it is more profitable.
During this time, we started flights with KLM. I wrote to them in 2020, encouraging them to come to Barbados, but their goal was Trinidad and Tobago and they started a winter flight via Port-of-Spain. An international, large airline like Lufthansa or KLM wouldn’t want to waste an aeroplane like an A330 with 300 seats to a destination like Barbados without having another airline to connect to other target destinations like Panama or Miami.
My company, Antillean Atlantic, wrote to the BTMI CEO many times to introduce my proposal for an airline project for Barbados and the Caribbean which could offer a completely different answer to issues like airlift, cargo, and tourism. Unfortunately, my proposal was never given serious consideration. My project proposal showed the opportunity of having a project for a global airline, increasing our airport to possibly over 6 million passengers in five years, from our current 2.15 million. If we had a better air and sea link, we would not only have the capability to be connected with more countries, but we could also reduce the cost of imported goods and freight using a long-haul global airline. Many people might be hesitant about this idea, especially after the LIAT failure and the cost it placed on our taxpayers. However, I was proposing just letting us finance the planning of the airline with a very limited amount of resources and after having a good plan with a viable business plan, we could receive some foreign investments and have some financial institutions helping, like CDB or IDB and, today, perhaps, the Afreximbank. This will be the best way we can come out of our crisis, creating more economy, not only with tourism but in transit passengers, cargo hubs, and all other related industry services.
For me, it’s difficult to fathom why a CEO would not want to consider all the possible avenues that could be explored to increase growth in the sector which he was so hefty paid to improve, especially when you have Prime Minister Mia Mottley telling the nation to start doing new business with alternatives markets, avoiding the middleman and lowering dependence of northern countries.
We got the AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum in September 2022 to finally open up some new trade and cultural connections, which, in my opinion, represents a very important step to open Barbados and the Caribbean not only to Africa but also create a bridge to South Europe, Middle East and Asia.
Oddly enough, there was no reported action mentioned by the BTMI CEO in that direction and all the new successes with new airlines like Norse Flight, Cayman Airways, and Bahamasair were said to be at the direct hands of Minister of Tourism Ian Edghill and/or Shelly Williams, chairman of BTMI.
Right now, we don’t have the time for play, since we need to inject some foreign exchange into our economy, especially when many small, medium and large businesses depend on it. This summer was worse than last summer for our economy as salaries remained the same, the cost of living has gone up every week since after COVID, and because of the current war in Ukraine.
I think we should all understand that we need a BTMI CEO who knows our market very well, along with the needed experience, since each market has a different particularity. For example, Asian tourist markets do well on their own for many reasons, such as the cost of goods, real estate, services, and very low labour costs. A combination of various tourist attractions, more historic sites, very old cultures, a tradition of quality services, and better flight connections make this tourist market extremely attractive to every type of traveller, manufacturer and investor. Doing well in Asia, like the CEO of a government marketing tourist institution, is not so difficult looking at all the advantages those countries present. But Barbados, I see, is a hard place to work, looking at all the challenges our country faces compared to other destinations which have plenty of advantages over us.
In looking at our former CEO, it is easy to say that his productivity and progress in our tourism market had fallen short of his impressive resume. And one could even argue it was easy for him to quickly trade in his office here in Barbados for one in Asia. It is important from now on to open ourselves to new ideas, having a new government department open to receiving all projects or ideas from normal people without always the need to contract expensive consultants or companies.
We have to switch things up a little, adjust to the changing times of today and start a new way of doing marketing because the current one is completely obsolete. I believe Barbados cannot be marketed alone because it has too much everyday competition with new destinations that open every year. I hope we will arrive at the free movement of goods and people soon because it could help a lot and speed up the needed improvement in tourism across the board.
I understand Minister Edghill has been moving in a better direction since he took office, so I hope we will soon get a new BTMI CEO who can understand all these issues, will be a person who has all the attributes I mentioned in my article, and will do primarily this work like a mission of service to the country and not base his or her performance on if the salary is high, receiving more benefit only if will bring results. I don’t think we need a guru but somebody who is open, flexible and who can share the positive, good energy of our people while representing us outside, marketing the true Barbados in many more countries, showing all those peculiarities you can only find in Barbados – of which we have plenty – which someone who lived long here can do. We have always worked profusely in convincing the tour operators and airlines to bring their clients to Barbados, but after they land in our ports of entry we don’t care much for them and this must change. We can’t afford to have these kinds of shortcomings anymore; I hope there will be a new direction from now on.
Alessandro Giustolisi is a former travel industry executive and the owner and operator of Antillean Atlantic.
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