News com­ing re­cent­ly from Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of T&T gen­er­al man­ag­er Hay­den New­ton, stat­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Airbnb fa­cil­i­ties are at­tract­ing a sig­nif­i­cant amount of at­ten­tion from vis­i­tors, is en­cour­ag­ing for the tourism sec­tor. So ex­pan­sive have the re­sults been that the Airbnb lodg­ings are out­dis­tanc­ing tra­di­tion­al ho­tels and guest hous­es, Mr New­ton has not­ed.

The AATT boss says the re­cov­ery has been “ro­bust” af­ter the shut­downs of the COVID-19-pe­ri­od, in which trav­el was at a min­i­mum dur­ing pe­ri­ods, and to­tal­ly non-ex­is­tent when the coun­try’s en­try points, air­ports and sea­ports were com­plete­ly shut down.

“We, at the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty, we have achieved growth in terms of pas­sen­ger num­bers that were, in fact, far ex­ceed­ing what we fore­cast,” Mr New­ton said in an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian.

The AA man­ag­er made the point that in 2O24 “we are back to the pre-COVID num­bers.” The good news is that Mr New­ton says the au­thor­i­ty is “not sit­ting and do­ing noth­ing but work­ing with the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port in terms of en­sur­ing that we are able to in­flu­ence pas­sen­gers from var­i­ous des­ti­na­tions to come to Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

The in­ter­na­tion­al tourism agen­cies pre­dict­ed that there would be an in­crease in trav­el by peo­ple who were locked in­to their coun­tries, cities and towns dur­ing the COVID-19 pe­ri­od, once the re­stric­tions on trav­el were re­moved.

“Maybe it’s the fact that we have a grow­ing Airbnb mar­ket where some of the young peo­ple from var­i­ous coun­tries in­ter­na­tion­al­ly are com­ing and stay­ing for 10 to 15 days in To­ba­go and in Trinidad,” New­ton said.

Fur­ther, he made the point that young trav­ellers in par­tic­u­lar were us­ing the Airbnb op­tions rather than the tra­di­tion­al ho­tels and such fa­cil­i­ties.

For many decades, Trinidad and To­ba­go has ig­nored and or not ful­ly tak­en ad­van­tage of the Caribbean lo­ca­tion of this coun­try, one of the most at­trac­tive and pop­u­lar tourism des­ti­na­tions in the world. The fact is that suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments and the pri­vate sec­tor have failed to de­vel­op the nat­ur­al at­trac­tions and those which have been cre­at­ed by the T&T cul­ture in a range of ar­eas.

As an in­di­ca­tion of the size of the in­dus­try, the World Tourism Or­gan­i­sa­tion es­ti­mates that 1.1 bil­lion tourists trav­elled in the first nine months of 2024 as the glob­al tourism sec­tor re­cov­ered up to 98 per cent com­pared to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els.

Specif­i­cal­ly, with re­gard to what is hap­pen­ing with the spread­ing of the Airbnb sec­tor here in T&T, is the po­ten­tial for open­ing oth­er tourism at­trac­tions to ac­com­pa­ny the sea and sand and the lux­u­ry of ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion. Now, it’s not a ques­tion of ig­nor­ing the ho­tel sec­tor, which will con­tin­ue to have its ded­i­cat­ed vis­i­tors com­ing for that kind of ser­vice ex­pe­ri­ence.

More­over, clever hote­liers will have to re­spond to the com­pe­ti­tion from Airbnb stay­over vis­i­tors and that can on­ly mean many more op­tions for the vis­i­tor. It is known in the in­ter­na­tion­al tourism in­dus­try that in­creas­ing­ly, vis­i­tors trav­el to get dif­fer­ing cul­tur­al ex­pe­ri­ences, which is sure­ly to be fa­cil­i­tat­ed by the Airbnb stay­overs.

The times ahead are go­ing to be chal­leng­ing in all of the tourism sec­tors, the fact be­ing that oth­er Caribbean des­ti­na­tions are ahead of T&T in tourism. Any new ini­tia­tive T&T de­vel­ops, there­fore, can on­ly help our cause.