Bell told all, nobody listened

In June, John Bell, a veteran of Caribbean Tourism, former general manager of the Bel Air Hotel in Trinidad and a former president of the Trinidad and Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association, was honoured by the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association as an icon of hospitality.

Bell has been a vocal champion of Caribbean tourism and TT tourism potential for decades, inspiring many of today's leaders in the industry to create a sustainable regional tourism industry. If anything, he was far too polite in his championing of TT tourism possibilities, perhaps mindful of his background and position as a white manager working in the industry, but there's no doubting the fundamental sense of his arguments over the years.

Lorenzo Baker created the first major Caribbean hotel, the 150-room Titchfield, in Port Antonio on Jamaica's north coast in the 1890s to take advantage of empty southbound ships from his United Fruit Company's banana trade route.

The industry has been good to the Caribbean, delivering almost half of export earnings, 25 per cent of GDP overall and a massive 70 per cent of incoming investment in the region.

For much of that time, TT, enthusiastically embracing oil and gas revenues, has steadfastly ignored the suggestions of Bell who, as recently as 2006, was still pointing out to the TT government that this country’s potential for a range of tourism vectors, including cultural tourism, eco-tourism, sports tourism and more were easy wins for the country to embrace.

To be fair though, successive TT governments have uniformly ignored all sensible calls to develop a holistic, unified and properly supported effort at developing local tourism. All the critical support planks continue to be ignored. Local attractions are allowed to fall into ruin, usually from the moment they are ceremonially opened. Room stock is deficient, scaling consistently downward to meet the continued failure to increase regular visitor numbers sustainably.

The latest bit of misdirection from the Ministry of Tourism is the development of a community-based tourism policy, which seeks, according to a March 2018 draft, to develop tourism attractions in local districts and communities. That document identifies a handful of projects that have struggled for years to build tourism vectors in this country, among them Nature Seekers on the east coast, Mariposa Enterprises in Lopinot and the Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project.

That policy document spells out the challenges faced by these nascent projects and the roles and responsibilities of government bodies but manages to express not one action plan or objective that could be pressed into action.

Another collection of words destined to never be put to work in the service of improving tourism.