While there were views ex­pressed on so­cial me­dia from for­mer politi­cians that Trade and Tourism should not have been placed in one min­istry, tourism stake­hold­ers want mar­ket­ing to be at the fore­front, along with oth­er chal­lenges to be ad­dressed.

Pres­i­dent of the Small Tourism Ac­com­mo­da­tion Own­ers of Trinidad and To­ba­go (STAOTT) Denise Ale­ong told Busi­ness Guardian that she is hope­ful the new Min­is­ter of Trade, In­vest­ment and Tourism, Satyaka­ma Ma­haraj, treats both min­istries with the amount of at­ten­tion they need. Be­fore be­ing ap­point­ed as a min­is­ter, Ma­haraj fo­cussed on run­ning his cos­met­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness.

She ad­vised that the fo­cus must not on­ly be on the big ho­tels and con­glom­er­ates to come to Trinidad.

“There are oth­er as­pects of tourism that need to be de­vel­oped. We have to wait and hear what plans the new min­is­ter has. I was hop­ing they might have ap­point­ed a ju­nior min­is­ter and let the ju­nior min­is­ter fo­cus on tourism. And then the sub­stan­tive min­is­ter fo­cus­es on the oth­er parts of the min­istry. Be­cause look how many ju­nior min­is­ters and par­lia­men­tary sec­re­taries they put in oth­er port­fo­lios,” Ale­ong ex­plained.

She not­ed that com­mu­ni­ty and her­itage tourism need at­ten­tion as well, as the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion did not fo­cus on build­ing on these pil­lars.

“We don’t want to start a con­ver­sa­tion again. Too much talk. We came out of a pan­dem­ic, and more ac­tion is need­ed. Along with reg­u­la­tions, and al­so rein­tro­duc­ing the stand­ing com­mit­tees. That was a good tool in keep­ing the in­dus­try like an en­gine go­ing all the time. The Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion had the stand­ing com­mit­tee, where you had all the stake­hold­ers meet­ing with the board. Of­fi­cials at the min­istry would know what’s go­ing on on the ground when it comes to tourism. We would come up with dif­fer­ent plans,” Ale­ong de­tailed.

An­oth­er sug­ges­tion for the min­is­ter and par­lia­men­tary sec­re­tary is to get this coun­try’s brand­ing and mar­ket­ing off the ground.

She added that her as­so­ci­a­tion is await­ing an in­vi­ta­tion from the min­is­ter to dis­cuss the way for­ward.

Giv­ing his per­spec­tive on this mat­ter was for­mer Min­is­ter of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts Ran­dall Mitchell, who said that glob­al­ly, tourism ranks third as a ma­jor ex­port cat­e­go­ry when con­sid­er­ing its val­ue in in­ter­na­tion­al trade.

Mitchell out­lined that it is con­sid­ered a ma­jor ex­port glob­al­ly and is valu­able lo­cal­ly, as it is iden­ti­fied as one of the ar­eas in T&T’s con­sis­tent at­tempts to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my.

Lo­cal­ly, he said tourism is an in­dus­try that is dy­nam­ic and labour in­ten­sive, con­tribut­ing to around 25,000 jobs pre-pan­dem­ic, and around $15 bil­lion to T&T’s an­nu­al Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct.

“It can be con­sid­ered a sub­set with­in the over­all um­brel­la of trade and in­dus­try” along with man­u­fac­tur­ing. There­fore, the area of tourism with­in the gov­ern­ment frame­work can­not be con­sid­ered an odd­ball when paired with trade and in­dus­try. It will be up to the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment to iden­ti­fy its pol­i­cy and strate­gic man­dates con­cern­ing the cre­ation of the new min­istry, since I have seen none in their man­i­festos,” the for­mer min­is­ter dis­closed.

Tourism has of­ten, in the past, been left as a stand-alone Min­istry, as Mitchell said, be­cause of its unique fea­tures and con­sid­er­a­tions that are very dis­tinct from oth­er sub­sets in the pro­duc­tive sec­tor where ex­port is con­cerned.

“For ex­am­ple, un­like goods that are ex­port­ed, noth­ing leaves our shores ex­cept hap­py vis­i­tors re­turn­ing home. The for­eign ex­change comes to us by way of vis­i­tors spend­ing on goods and ser­vices in our coun­try. Al­so, there needs to be a co­a­les­cence of a num­ber of state agen­cies com­ing to­geth­er for the suc­cess of our tourism sec­tor, such as im­mi­gra­tion, Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty, Port Au­thor­i­ty, the po­lice ser­vice etc,” he high­light­ed.

Mitchell in­di­cat­ed that un­der the last ad­min­is­tra­tion, there was the com­bi­na­tion of tourism with cul­ture and the arts, be­cause there was a nat­u­ral­ly oc­cur­ring, mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial al­liance be­tween both sec­tors, since one of our great­est unique sell­ing propo­si­tions was T&T’s vi­brant cul­ture, which is world-renowned.

“ We will see how this new it­er­a­tion of the tourism fares in the new ad­min­is­tra­tion and hold them to ac­count,” said Mitchell

Busi­ness­woman and for­mer To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try & Com­merce pres­i­dent Di­ane Hadad be­lieves it is a good idea to mar­ry both trade and tourism to­geth­er.

Hadad stressed that there are too many parts of trade that af­fect tourism in terms of if this coun­try is go­ing to go in­to tourism prop­er­ly, there are cer­tain con­ces­sions that are need­ed.

What it seems like she said is that Min­is­ter Ma­haraj, who has the port­fo­lio, will need the right sys­tem in sub­di­vi­sions of the min­istry to en­sure that he has the right sup­port to car­ry out the dif­fer­ent tasks for both.

On what needs to be done to pro­pel the tourism sec­tor, Hadad said the au­thor­i­ties need to spend the cor­rect amount of mon­ey for brand­ing and mar­ket­ing, as those bud­gets are phe­nom­e­nal for a coun­try this size.

“We are so far be­hind. Oth­er peo­ple are so far ahead of us, and the spend­ing that they do, for us to get our hair in, we will have to spend a lot more than they do to get our­selves recog­nised. So, tourism ac­tu­al­ly needs, and to speak about the San­dals mod­el, the San­dals mod­el was quite ide­al for a start be­cause the lux­u­ry re­sort is al­ready brand­ed all over the world. Their mar­ket­ing alone would have helped us, San­dals brand alone would have giv­en us a big boost,” Hadad added.

Mean­while, Charles Car­val­ho, founder and mem­ber of the Tourism In­dus­try As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go, al­so ex­pressed that mar­ket­ing needs to be at the fore­front.

“We had a Zoom meet­ing with one of the new gen­er­al man­agers of a ho­tel in Port of Spain, who said he came from Aru­ba, and he nev­er knew about this coun­try, which is right next door. He did re­search on the in­ter­net about T&T, and the first four items that came up were crime, crime, crime.”

“It is not the in­ter­net push­ing crime; it is we push­ing crime, by the num­ber of neg­a­tive things we put out. So we have to pull back on that for tourism to suc­ceed. The cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go have to be less neg­a­tive in terms of the tourism in­dus­try, for tourism to sur­vive and to be suc­cess­ful,” Car­val­ho lament­ed.

He stat­ed that this coun­try does have a lot to of­fer tourism and cau­tioned the min­is­ter on who he takes ad­vice from about the in­dus­try, “as there are many peo­ple who feel they are ex­perts in this field and the truth is they are not.”