Q & A with Peter Odle, President of the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA)

Caribbean Marketplace 2007 -Aruba

Once again this year, CHA and CTO have squandered a good opportunity to attend FITUR and cotton on to what this tradeshow actually means to the endeavor of bringing the Caribbean closer to a major outbound market and ever-expanding hotel investor in the region like Spain. Even now that a good deal of Caribbean countries have decided to join the Madrid fair, these two organizations have once again turned their backs on both FITUR and Spain.

Q.- You’re not a bureaucrat, but a man of action, a hotelier, a businessman. Why is CHA taking such a narrow-minded look at outbound markets other than the U.S. and the UK?

A.- I think it’s not the Caribbean because if you look through the Caribbean you’ll find that there’s a huge Spanish influence in the Dominican Republic. If you look into the English-speaking Caribbean, those nations have a huge English and American influence. And if you look into the Dutch Caribbean, those countries have a strong influence from the Netherlands.

That has happened over the years because people gravitate naturally to their language, their roots and so forth. For example, Barbados is much an English country and England has looked at it that way for years.

Therefore, people there feel very comfortable with Britons visiting their island nation since they’re English in their customs. Whereas, in the Dominican Republic they’re Spanish in their customs, so the people from Spain are going to gravitate there.

Q.- When a Spanish group invests in a particular country and builds its own hotels there, and brings in its tour operators and its airlines, the recipient country grows in terms of Spanish tourism. The best case in point is Aruba. Aruba opened a tourism office in Spain. In the course of three years, four Spanish hotel groups have landed in Aruba. If that were the case in other countries, tourism will be on the rise in those nations as well.

A.- You’ll probably find that’s correct. Look at Jamaica. Jamaica is now having the RIU Group and they have a lot of people coming. But the point is that some of the smallest countries have a challenge with land space.

Q.- But Aruba is a small country, much smaller than many other nations, like Jamaica.

A.- Yes, it’s small but it has more land space and more space for development than quite a few of the other countries. However, I take what you’re saying, that people establish areas or offices in Spain, in Holland or wherever it is and they get business.

We have an office in France and we’ve had it for years, and as a result of that we’ve had business coming from France. We have an office in the UK and we have an office in Sweden, and we have an office in Germany.

But that hasn’t resulted in people or companies coming because, again, investors look at the returns of their investments and they may not be what they want. So, I don’t think you may just set up an office and expect that within two or three years you’re going to get what you want.

Q.- FITUR is the world’s second-largest tourism fair right now. Barbados has been coming to FITUR over the past three years but they don’t come with a schedule or a particular agenda. I think destinations need to work the markets to get results and so I wonder why they’re coming back to FITUR this time around. I believe Barbados, CHA and the rest of the small Caribbean islands should work together to reach out to Spanish investors and tour operators that will attend FITUR. What do you think of this job that ought to be done?

A.- That’s what this new company, CTDC (Caribbean Tourism Development Company), has been created for. As CTDC starts netting revenues, these are the sort of things that we have to do. We need to speak with one voice, we need to go into the Spanish-speaking areas and into the Dutch-speaking areas and speak with one voice. We have to market there as good as we do in the World Travel Market in London or Berlin’s ITB.