Sandals’ US radio promotion reaches over ten million listeners

“A success” is how General Manager for Sandals Barbados, Fernand Zievinger, described the recently concluded United States radio station promotion hosted by the hotel and Visit Barbados.

The initiative saw 20 stations from across the US on location at the resort, spreading the word about the new Sandals Royal hotel set to open by year-end and about the island of Barbados through a number of live broadcasts between July 12-14 and July 17-19.

Speaking to the media yesterday, Zievinger stated that the last broadcast had been completed on Thursday, and in total the radio audience reached was approximately 10.5 million listeners.

He highlighted that throughout the process, several experts were interviewed, including the Minister of Tourism, several tourism stakeholders and locals shared their knowledge about the island in a bid to attract persons to the island.

During the promotion, Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc, (BTMI) Director for the United States, Petra Roach, expressed her expectations that this tourism season would be a good one for the island in terms of visitors from America.

“This is a massive initiative and a brilliant opportunity to showcase Barbados to the US in a way that is unique and, quite frankly, hard to ignore,” she said.

“We are always working to stimulate demand for the destination and the statistics show that Barbados is becoming increasingly more appealing to Americans.

“Business from the United States has grown from 118 000 in 2014 to 169 000 in 2016. So far for this year, US visitor numbers are already up by 20 per cent over the same period last year with 2017 projected to exceed 1987, which has the highest visitation to Barbados from the USA ever,” she had stressed at that time. (JMB)