What is happening to the once beautiful harbour Port of George Town? We seem to have gone in a short space of time from a quaint – though busy – tropical Port to a replica of AnyPort, USA.
It is starting to look very ugly down there with huge advertising signs and cheap, sub-standard discount jewellery houses. GT Harbour is really looking rather low end and shabby these days.
Once upon a time, to disembark upon these shores from a cruise tender was a wonderful experience as tourists stepped aboard the terminals off Hog Sty Bay.
The tourist-themed attractions and product on offer combined a nice mix of cultural Cayman and strong, quality international brands in jewels, clothing and hospitality.
However now we see an eradication of the uniqueness and once quaint Cayman port in favour of massive advertising signage, countless jewellery discount stores in the middle of Town in addition to the all-ready present Senor Frogs, Margaritaville, and Hard Rock Cafe (in spirit of openness, my family has strong ties to this business, yet we see the pattern and are concerned).
Congratulations to Breezes, they do try to offer a strongly regional themed menu to ensure a guest has a Caribbean experience.
How long before a Wal-Mart is set up on the Elmslie Church site?
Maybe we will see Starbucks and McDonalds too, with a bridge straight to the cruise ships to wheel everybody in and out without setting foot on the shores and experiencing the Islands. Lets make it easy for people – stop going on cruises at all and tell them to visit their own home town, they can buy the same stuff there and any duty savings would be offset by not spending on travel!
The introduction of a craft market is an excellent tourist addition, yet it will take the cruise passengers 20 minutes to get there from the RWT. And on their walk they will not see anything tropical, nor Caymanian, instead they are going to be bombarded with cheap jewels, breasts, beer and 40-foot ocean freight containers – is this really the picture Cayman wants taken? At least Jimmy Buffett will be singing to them….
Let’s stop the dumbing down of tourism Cayman before it gets out of hand. I’ve lived in the Bahamas for years; their downtown port was once pretty and is now pretty awful and they are suffering for it.
Whoever is in charge of planning, permitting, licensing for downtown GT must look at the bigger picture and ask themselves – is it representing Cayman? Is the new RWT disembarkation location really in the interests of the guest experience? Are we simply mirroring all other ports and losing our attractiveness altogether?
There should be pedestrian zones for certain hours of the day to enable the millions of cruise passengers to safely get by the container port to the craft market three days a week (Tues/Weds/Thursday from 8am-4pm). Or are we waiting for one of them to get killed – remember, the majority of them think the cars are coming from the other direction.
There should be a watchdog program rolled out that ensures where practical all downtown businesses represent Cayman either through staffing levels, or food offerings (e.g. percentage of a menu must have local dishes), or jewellery designs (diamond stingrays), etc, etc.
It can happen. Cayman can move forward with the global economy, yet also represent itself culturally. But a stand must be taken as to how far we wish to see the tourism product and the aesthetic offering of downtown GT dumbed down and homogenised into AnyPort, USA in favour of a quick buck?
Keith Doyle
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