Nadaleen Singh

T&T is look­ing to the di­as­po­ra mar­ket and to the Cari­com mar­ket to boost its tourism in­dus­try, says Tourism Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz.He said T&T has lost 60 per cent of the Cari­com mar­ket.Cadiz was ad­dress­ing mem­bers of the lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia at a news con­fer­ence held yes­ter­day at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain.

The news con­fer­ence marked the start of the 14th An­nu­al Caribbean Con­fer­ence on Sus­tain­able Tourism De­vel­op­ment (STC-14) themed Keep­ing the Right Bal­ance, En­hanc­ing Des­ti­na­tion Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Through Prod­ucts, Part­ner­ships and Prof­itabil­i­ty.The con­fer­ence is ex­pect­ed to ex­plore the ways in which the Caribbean can en­hance des­ti­na­tion sus­tain­abil­i­ty and com­pet­i­tive­ness in the cur­rent glob­al en­vi­ron­ment.

"Trinidad and To­ba­go have lost 60,000 Cari­com trav­ellers over five years. We have 100,000 Cari­com trav­ellers (who) come to T&T for what­ev­er rea­son and that dropped off. I think one of the rea­sons for that is the cost of in­ter-is­land trav­el."Cadiz said there is need to find ways and means of bring­ing T&T back to "where we were be­fore, get­ting back the 60,000, so that is just with­in the Caribbean."

De­scrib­ing the di­as­po­ra mar­ket as a "huge" mar­ket he said there are mil­lions of peo­ple liv­ing in Cana­da, the Unit­ed King­dom and Unit­ed States and the min­istry's tar­get is to at­tract the chil­dren of the di­as­po­ra to re­turn, he said it is a "de­mo­graph­ic we have to start look­ing at very se­ri­ous­ly."

Cadiz added that the min­istry wants to des­ig­nate 2014 as a "com­ing home year" for chil­dren of the di­as­po­ra and al­ready Caribbean Air­lines Lim­it­ed (CAL) is achiev­ing this, be­cause 90 per cent of the pas­sen­gers which fly Caribbean Air­lines Ltd (CAL) com­prise of the di­as­po­ra.Re­fer­ring to the mar­ket­ing bud­get for tourism, Cadiz said it has al­ways been low but, the min­istry is not daunt­ed as a lot can be achieved with a lim­it­ed bud­get. He an­tic­i­pat­ed that in the 2013/2014 bud­get the min­istry would re­ceive a greater bud­get.