Carol Hay, Director of Marketing, UK/Europe, CTO

Carol Hay, Director of Marketing, UK/Europe, CTO
By Jose Carlos de Santiago – WTM 2011 (London)

Carol Hay, CTO’s director of marketing for UK and Europe, sat down with Caribbean News Digital at the recently-concluded WTM 2011 in London. In this exclusive interview, Mrs. Hay talked about the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s attendance to fairs and tradeshows in the Old World.

The CTO attends tourism trade fairs such us WTM and ITB, but it does not take part FITUR in Madrid, which is the second-largest important travel show in the world. Why is that?
As you know, CTO is a member owned organization, and the events we organize and/or participate in are guided by our members and budgets. When budgets are small it means that they have to be leveraged and maximized and our members must determine how to spend their tight budgets most effectively and which markets will generate the highest level of return.

So, what we have found within Europe is that people are participating less in trade shows for the sake of just having a presence, and the focus now is targeting shows where they feel they would definitely be able to do business.  We do have some destinations for which the Spanish market is a primary market, and you would have noticed that they still have a presence at FITUR and we continue to work on the Spanish market and hope we will get to a position where once again the CTO and its member countries can have a presence there, because that is a target and a goal that we are working towards.

Anyway, it is worthy to note that as WTM is not just for the British travel market, FITUR Spain is not just for the Spanish market, but oriented to the tourist industry worldwide…
I agree with you, that it is not solely for that market. But I think it is a given that if an event is taking place in a particular market, that predominantly those are who you will see. So you might find that if someone has a small budget they will not go to FITUR in the hope of meeting German or English operators, they will go to those specific markets. So, although FITUR is an international event with an international reach, you will find that when budgets are smaller harsh decisions have to be made about where the money can be spent.

The seven Central American countries attend to travel shows as a region, under the umbrella of CATA (Central America Tourism Agency)… They do not have the budget to attend as individual countries, so they promote their selves altogether. Do you think this could be a solution for the CTO countries?
This is the strategy we have used at many of the events that we attend because we believe that the strategy of sharing resources with our members makes sense. However, as I stated earlier, destinations where Spain is not their number one market would have decided not to invest there at the moment, choosing to spend their limited budgets in other markets. However, at the same time we are always looking for marketing opportunities, and hopefully the market will return to a level in which FITUR can once again be an event where the Caribbean has a pavilion that we share with our members.