Complacency could send the Caribbean tourism industry the same way as it sent sugar one hundred years ago.
That’s the message from Professor Avinash Persaud, ex-financier, current hotelier and emerging markets specialist. He told delegates at the Caribbean Tourism Organisation’s conference the once-thriving sugar industry failed due to lack of investment from the private sector. Partly because of this, it fell from a highly-developed system to become the most inefficient in the world.
He marked out three key issues that needed to be addressed immediately by the tourism sector; crime, service quality and the environment.
“We need a zero-tolerance approach to all crimes,” he said to supportive cheers. Criminals, he continued, did not have a sense of moral duty, therefore did not care if innocent bystanders were caught in the crossfire.
“If overseas governments want to help we should let them … we can only be independent if we are economically strong and we cannot be economically strong with crime.”
On the aspect of the environment, he said the region has long mined its resources to generate revenues, but warned that there was a need to invest back into the environment. This would allow the balance sheet to grow due to returns on investment, which may need a rethink in the ways that the environment was exploited.
Regarding quality of service, Mr. Persaud suggested improving the exposure of staff to benchmark performance expectations. This could be facilitated through staff exchange trips which could raise awareness and consciousness.
“They don’t know what they don’t know,” he said.
On an investment level, the professor said that on a world basis there were many assets but no money whereas the Caribbean had money but not assets that were thought of as interesting profitable opportunities. There was US$10 billion in banks and pension funds doing ‘very little’ but ‘bloated government expenditure’ and securities were all that banks were interested in investing in. The question he posited was why should they take the risk and from a Caribbean view, how to better employ available capital.
Ending on an up note he praised the region’s ‘amazing qualities’ and said these made it sadder that the region was complacent enough to fritter away its assets as a creative region.
“There is no more entrepreneurial region … we are in the middle of two of the world’s largest markets in North and South America. What fails us is complacency and hunger.”
He said converting this creativity into commercial economic success would enrich all people of the Caribbean.
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