Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA) Director General and Chief Executive Officer Alec Sanguinetti said Caribbean governments need to sit together and agree on a way forward for the tourism industry.
CHTA Director General and CEO Alec Sanguinetti
Sanguinetti told Guyana Times International in an interview that such a move will pave the way for a more robust tourism industry, which continues to be affected by high electricity costs and taxes. The CEO believes that much more needs to be done to strengthen this sector, which could prove to benefit both the governments and peoples of the Caribbean.
Sanguinetti, who was a speaker of the recently-concluded Sustainable Tourism Conference STC-13 held in Guyana, said: “In the Caribbean, we fail to implement what we have agreed to do and if we cannot overcome that, I think we are not going to succeed.”
According to him, the Caribbean has continuously failed to implement action plans coming out of such conferences, but he hopes that the STC-13 was one with a difference. Sanguinetti noted that the region’s potential, especially in tourism, has been studied and reviewed ad nauseam, to give governments and civil society important facts that could be taken into consideration to improve and develop tourism.
Pointing to intra-regional travel, Sanguinetti said that in 2006 the CHTA recorded 1.6 million intra-Caribbean travellers, but by the end of 2010, this figure dropped to just over 500,000 persons. “Over the four years, we lost 1.1 million intra-regional travellers. Now that is unacceptable, because it shows there is a market,” he emphasised.
The CEO stated that the right circumstances: cheap air fares and regular scheduled transport all contributed to the 2006 figure, which points to how many people want to travel.
Sanguinetti believes that high airfares, inconsistent scheduling, and visa issues are all unacceptable. “Why a Caribbean person with a Caribbean passport from a Caribbean country needs a visa to travel to another Caribbean country? We need to get rid of this,” he stressed.
Sanguinetti said the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) speaks about the need to improve intra-regional travel in the Caribbean.
Another constraint in the tourism sector is taxation, which affects the amount of money spent by tourists, Sanguinetti said. Many hotels in the region have been forced to maintain their prices, even though taxes have increased substantially in most countries.
According to him, from 2007 to 2010 visitor spending dropped from US$ 4.7 billion. “This shows that there are some fundamental issues in our tourism industry that we have to address,” Sanguinetti stated. Taxation for Caribbean hotel owners is still 14-15 per cent over what it was in 2007.
Another issue, he said, that prevents investors from investing in the Caribbean is the fact that the cost for electricity and energy in the Caribbean is the highest in the world. While hotel owners pay US$ 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt for electricity in other parts of the world, they pay somewhere around US$ 35 to $ 45 cents in the Caribbean, which is a major setback for businesses.
Sanguinetti believes that chain hotels have been expanding operations in Latin America and Central America, but most times boycott the Caribbean, based on the many issues affecting the region’s tourism industry.
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