Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA)Tourism, An­tiq­ui­ties and Cre­ative In­dus­tries Sec­re­tary Zor­isha Hack­ett says the key to the is­land’s tourism suc­cess lies in build­ing a sol­id plan.

Ad­mit­ting that past gov­ern­ments were no­to­ri­ous for dis­card­ing plans and projects cre­at­ed by oth­er po­lit­i­cal par­ties, Hack­ett said as To­ba­go be­gins to im­ple­ment its own tourism plans un­der the new Far­ley Au­gus­tine-led ad­min­is­tra­tion, they will take a dif­fer­ent ap­proach.

“We hope that gov­er­nance is con­tin­u­ous. That is the aim, that you build plans so sol­id that even if a gov­ern­ment changes, they see the val­ue and mer­it in that plan,” Hack­ett told Guardian Me­dia at the Caribbean Tourism Or­gan­i­sa­tion’s Sus­tain­able Tourism Con­fer­ence in Be­lize last week.

She em­pha­sised the crit­i­cal need to en­sure that the tech­nocrats and pub­lic ser­vants trans­fer the knowl­edge, “whether a par­tic­u­lar po­lit­i­cal or­gan­i­sa­tion is at the helm or not.”

The To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) cur­rent­ly holds all 15 seats in the THA, so un­like Be­lize, there is no op­po­si­tion to con­sult. How­ev­er, Hack­ett says the TPP is work­ing with a 20-year plan for To­ba­go, one that goes be­yond an elec­tion man­i­festo.

She said, “We sat down and pulled out as a seg­ment of the strate­gic de­vel­op­ment plan­ning path­way that we know was just a bite-sized that was re­al­is­able in this four-year pe­ri­od. And so, we have been stick­ing very close­ly to it. Every sin­gle el­e­ment of the gov­er­nance struc­ture has to stick to that plan. We re­view it quar­ter­ly...We spend time re­al­ly go­ing over whether or not they’re still as vi­able and they’re still as rel­e­vant as we ex­pect them to be.”

Hack­ett al­so re­vealed that the TPP is build­ing on some el­e­ments of the pre­vi­ous PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion’s plans, with some tweaks, as part of what she calls ma­ture gov­er­nance.

“If we are re­al­ly cus­to­di­ans of the pub­lic purse, then we would un­der­stand when a plan is a good plan. And a plan [that] ben­e­fits the peo­ple...that plan should be, with ma­ture and re­spon­si­ble gov­er­nance, ex­e­cut­ed to that place of com­ple­tion. Gov­ern­ment come, gov­ern­ment go.”

Mean­while, when it comes to tourism, Be­lize’s goals are clear—the coun­try aims to be­come a “unique, au­then­tic, sus­tain­able and com­pet­i­tive world-class des­ti­na­tion” by 2030.

To do this, Be­lize has de­vel­oped a Na­tion­al Sus­tain­able Tourism Mas­ter Plan (NSTMP).

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, Jo­sue Car­ballo, Be­lize’s chief tourism of­fi­cer, said they have a 20-year plan guid­ing in­fra­struc­ture, gov­er­nance and in­vest­ment de­ci­sions.

Up­dat­ed in 2024 to ac­count for post-pan­dem­ic changes and in­cor­po­rate cli­mate re­silience strate­gies, such as a com­mit­ment to plant one mil­lion trees and sus­tain­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tives, Car­ballo says it’s built on da­ta and, more im­por­tant­ly, long-term plan­ning.

He said Be­lize fo­cus­es on high-val­ue, low-im­pact tourism, aim­ing to in­crease vis­i­tor spend and their length of stay at the des­ti­na­tion.

Lever­ag­ing its strengths in the blue, green and or­ange economies, Be­lize has seen its overnight stays in 2025 jump to 551, 698 based on pre­lim­i­nary num­bers, a 9.6 per cent in­crease from pre-pan­dem­ic fig­ures.

But with tourism ac­count­ing for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 40- 46 per cent of the coun­try’s $6.5 bil­lion GDP, how do you stay on track when a change of gov­ern­ment could mean a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent vi­sion?

Car­ballo says lead­ers have to think be­yond pol­i­tics.

“That’s crit­i­cal when you talk about medi­um to long-term plan­ning,” Car­ballo said.

“Back when the NSTMP was done, con­sul­ta­tion was on board with the gov­ern­ment and with the op­po­si­tion... It’s im­por­tant from the be­gin­ning to have par­tic­i­pa­tion from all ma­jor en­ti­ties, in­clud­ing po­lit­i­cal par­ties on both ends. So, they un­der­stand the process, they be­come a part of it, and then it be­comes [a] 15, 20, 30-year plan.”