Selling Trinidad and Tobago

Paolo Kernahan

JAMAICA and Barbados have topped a list of emerging digital nomad hotspots for 2025. The list is based on a study evaluating countries on factors like cost of living, co-working facilities, and employment rates.

Digital nomad is a broad umbrella term that covers all sorts of people, from online coaches, SEO (search engine optimisation) experts, content creators, copywriters, graphic designers, virtual assistants, remote customer service support, etc. Anyone whose work and income are not location-specific.

I’ve been shilling TT as the ideal destination for eco-tourists, content creators and digital nomads for a long time. When I produced television shows about TT, I went with local eco-tour operator Stephen Broadbridge to the Mt Tamana bat caves. On that trip, there was also a young man from the UK tagging along with our crew. He was one of four originally booked to go.

The night before, the group got completely blotto liming at the then Pelican Inn. The young man on the excursion with us was the sole survivor of the night’s depravations. He was blown away by the experience of being swallowed up by a hurricane of bats as millions left their roost in the caves to feed; he couldn't stop talking about it. That is TT – a multidimensional experience. You can imbibe the lime/fete culture and have an ecotourism experience in a way few other Caribbean destinations can deliver.

With that memory in mind, and against my better judgement, I popped over to TikTok and Instagram to see what kind of digital marketing TT’s tourism agencies have been doing. When I typed Trinidad into the search bar on Instagram, the Tourism Trinidad page came up.

This page is a hodgepodge of ministry officialdom; sterile posts of portraits capturing functions, seminars, conferences and so on. The line minister, who is a stranger to any foreigner stumbling onto Tourism Trinidad’s content, featured prominently. Even worse, the posts were interspersed with ads for job vacancies that were not sized properly for Instagram. It doesn’t matter who the target audience is, the paucity of likes and comments suggests the "content" just isn’t interesting enough.

Tourism Trinidad explains the boring content on its page by pointing out that it has several different accounts marketing the destination. “Each page has a clear target market and purpose,” it says.

By my count, there are five TT tourist-related pages on Instagram – Tourism Trinidad, Visit Trinidad, Tobago Tourism Agency Ltd, Visit Tobago, and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts. Tell any digital marketer you have five official pages on one social media platform for a small tourist destination and you’d probably get the criminal side-eye.

When marketing a destination, you want to make it as easy and seamless as possible to get browsers directly to the product. If, like me, outsiders find the Tourism Trinidad page with its dry ministry-oriented content when searching Instagram, it’s unlikely they’ll think, “Oh, there has to be another official page with touristy content. Let me keep looking.”

Unless our multitudinous tourism agencies have in their ranks SEO wizzes, and the evidence suggests otherwise, it’s impossible to control which of their many pages travellers will see first. Getting your content in front of digital audiences is already notoriously difficult. You don’t do yourself any favours by further crowding an already congested online space.

It has been argued that Jamaica and Barbados, for example, also have more than one page on Instagram – a government page and one that strictly promotes the destination. (That’s three fewer pages than our five!) But both islands have far greater brand recognition and fidelity than TT.

When travellers search for content from Jamaica and Barbados, they already know the brands, and they’re probably looking for something specific about the destinations they’re already sold on. Even so, the Jamaica Tourist Board is hip to using SEO to convert more searches online into actual bookings. In 2019, potential tourists searched for Jamaica online 843 million times.

In TT, we have to work smarter than our neighbours to the north because we simply don’t have the same strength of brand. In my opinion, our tourism product is infinitely more diverse than our competitors. Plus, we have decent infrastructure, co-working spaces, reliable internet service, and countless activities for tourists and digital nomads.

Naturally, rampant crime would have to be bridled to make the most of global market opportunities, but our potential is meaningless if we remain invisible to these sustainable sources of forex.