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Look to Latinos
9/21/2009
Hutson: South America could improve tourism, trade
THE possibility of seeing high levels of tourists coming to Barbados throughout the year may not be as far from reality as one might think.
So says Minister of International Business and International Transport, George Hutson, who believes that South America may provide a number of answers for Barbados in terms of filling the void of the “off” season and also creates an opportunity for direct trade to the island.
He was speaking to the media yesterday after a church service to mark the start of Maritime Week in Barbados where he said, “We see possibilities where we could have persons interested in a cruise from Brazil and other South American destinations actually travelling to Barbados by air and picking up the cruise ships from here and doing a cruise into the northern Caribbean with Barbados functioning as a home port facility.”
“We have had some preliminary discussions with the cruise line personnel when they were here around the end of August. We have the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association meeting in St. Lucia coming up towards the end of October and we are hoping to be present at the meeting and see how we can get that sort of programme into their itinerary.”
Minister Hutson said that there are “tremendous spinoffs” to the regular tourism season as we know it in Barbados if the South American component is added.
“Because winter in South America also coincides with summer here, it means that you can have travellers from South American countries that are experiencing winter, coming to Barbados and if we can get that going we can actually find ourselves down the road with continuous high level of traffic. The hard times of the summer within the industry may be a thing of the past once we can get that development going,” he said.
With regard to the world crisis, he noted that countries in South America do not seem to be impacted on the same scale as larger economies. “So we need to start thinking a little bit out of the box in my view, certainly where we focus our marketing efforts,” he noted.
“The opportunities are there, we have to put the infrastructure in place over at the port and at the airport because you can appreciate that those persons coming from South America fly into Barbados and then fly back out of Barbados in the way that people fly into Puerto or Miami to pick up cruises. So we have to do alot of work in those areas,” he said.
The Member of Parliament for St. James Central opined that there are substantial opportunities that can accrue with respect to trade.
“Alot of South American goods coming into the supermarkets in Barbados are being routed through Miami and then back to Barbados. So our traditional corporate players... they all have facilities in Miami where they consolidate their cargo and then send it down to Barbados so you are seeing “stuff” in Barbados supermarkets that are made in South America or Latin America but everything is being routed through Miami – why is that necessary?” he queried.
“So the private sector has to get on board and recognise that there are opportunities to actually ship direct, by means of air freight or by ship out of South America and cut out the Miami component because that adds to freight, automatically adds to insurance costs and then obviously goods being landed in Barbados would be that much higher,” he revealed.
He said that as this is addressed, it creates opportunities in our economy for new players to come onto the market.
“...Because the whole question of the monopoly or near monopoly situations is one of the areas that we feel is contributing to the high prices so we have to be able to break that traditional way of doing things,” Minister Hutson said. (JH)
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