Q & A with Vincent Vanderpool-WallaceSecretary-General of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO)

The Caribbean wrapped up the year 2005 as a far more attractive travel destination. Figures speak volumes of the region´s achievements: 42 million tourists –up a solid 3.5 percent from 2004. Yet the Caribbean has a long way to go to max out this winning streak. It must seek and lure new markets, encourage investors from around the world, open up new spaces in world tradeshows and fairs, and make the best of what the World Wide Web has to offer as far as promotional opportunities are concerned.

The Caribbean Tourism Organization will focus aggressively on all these directions and will do it with the help of the Caribbean Hotel Association –both entities signed recently a mutual collaboration agreement. The CTO is willing to put its heart and soul into these efforts. This is what CTO´s secretary-general Vincent Vanderpool said about all of the above in an exclusive interview with Caribbean News Digital.

Q.- Mr. Vanderpool, how well is the agreement between CTO and CHA faring, and what´s your opinion about the importance of this agreement for Spain viewed in terms of the relationship between the Caribbean nations and Europe?

A.- Well, the agreement between CTO and CHA has been working far better than anybody expected. They can now speak for us, we can speak for them on a number of issues because we now understand each other a great deal more.

As far as the development of our businesses in various markets go, we´re now just beginning to get a number of our partners to recognize that certain non-traditional markets are as important –if not more important in the long term than they ever were.

And they´re beginning to hear us for one special reason for this: they recognize that the way to do business is by changing, that if you´re not on the Internet you may be missing part of the picture. But to be on the Internet is much less expensive than having to print large numbers of brochures, making large number of trips to many places. So the focus now is going to be on making sure we have a wonderful website in all of the languages, that are necessary, and making sure we have representation in a number of markets to go and let people know where they can find the Caribbean and all the details they need to know about destinations and about hotels.

So, the focus is changing. The cost to be represented in each and every single market is now going down because a lot more people are finding out about the Caribbean by the Internet.

Q.- What do you think of the different Spanish groups and hoteliers and their possibilities in all different countries in the Caribbean?

A.- It´s very welcome. We´re finding that the fastest way to get large number of people from the UK is to get UK investment; the fastest way to get people from America is to get American investment; the best way to get people from France is to get French investment. So, the best way to get people from Spain is through Spanish investment.

What we´re trying to do is to get these groupings of people who understand the markets to come along with us. That has really been the difficulty, that until other hoteliers see a group of hoteliers going to a particular marketplace, they don´t come. But if you get the Spanish companies coming to a certain destination, you´re going to find that a number of hotels and destinations will begin to grow over time.

So, there´s no question that as these operations grow more and more every single year, more and more people will come to understand the good values in that marketplace.

Q.- What´s your assessment of travel and tourism portals like ours –Caribeinside.com- and how much do you believe our portal has helped the Caribbean? Do you think it´ll be possible that CTO and Caribeinside.com could work together?

A.- I´d never thought about that before. That´s a very good idea. When we get a website built what is very important is maintenance. I´m making it so that somebody is going to maintain it and somebody is going to make sure that the information on it is oriented to the people who are thought to be reading it. What does not work is to take an English website and translate it into a Spanish website. That doesn´t work. You´ve got to find out what the Spanish travel agents, tour operators and consumers want and make sure you have that up front.

So, we need somebody to help us build that. So, if Caribeinside.com could do that, to help us do it, we´re prepared to consider that.

Q.- CTO wants to make a road show in Spain to tour Majorca, Barcelona and Madrid, plus a number of other main cities across Spain. When are you exactly planning to do that?

A.- We´re going to do that right after London´s World Travel Market in November. Right after that, we´ve decided to go on a road show to make sure we can bring people who are already there in the UK, and then do some road shows. That´s why it needs to be after that.

Q.- What can you tell our readers about CTO´s new policy and its job all around the world?

A.- What we´re doing –and all of our members have said it´s the right thing to do- is to make sure that people have a better understanding of the Caribbean everywhere, that they know how to get information on the Caribbean everywhere. That´s why the development of websites in languages is a number one task for us to make sure that´s going to happen. More and more people will get the ability to know more and more about the Caribbean far more easily than ever before, and we´re beginning to see that.

For example, the fastest-growing market for the Caribbean is the category called other, all those countries that were lumped together because we didn´t want to break them out. But that´s growing faster. Why? Because people can access now a lot more information about the Caribbean on the Internet, no matter where they are and decide to come.

So, we want to encourage that in a lot more markets for them to be stimulated. We´re beginning to promote our Web aggressively so that people in Spain, people in France, people in Germany, people in Italy know where to go to get information on the Caribbean very easily, and lower the costs for our members –hoteliers and countries- from printing brochures and having to distribute them in the various countries.

Q.- What´s the CTO´s stance in the face of a new organization that a number of Spanish-speaking countries want to create? This is a new organization parallel to CTO that could be willing to stand up for the interests of these various countries. What do you make of that?

A.- Well, they already exist and they´re already operating. For example, at the end of this month I´m going to a meeting of the ministers of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, but they´re all part of CTO, so what we´re doing is that we´re showing them what CTO can do for them because now they´re coming together as a group and we´ll hear what they want. That´s much better than having us go to every single individual country. Countries are organizing themselves and saying, ‘yes, that´s what we want from CTO,´ and now we´re finding ourselves in a much better position to serve their needs.

We don´t have any objection to that. We think it may help accelerate our job to get something done for a number of our countries.

Q.- What is CTO doing to lure countries like Mexico, Colombia and other small nations into its membership?

A.- Well, we´re going very slowly on that, deliberately. The reason is we want to make sure we´re doing all that we can right for our existing members before we start adding a lot more members. So, we´re eventually going to grow, but we want to make sure we get everything right for our existing members first before we start growing a great deal more rapidly now. We already have an application from Colombia to join our organization, as well as from a couple of other countries, and we´ve responded to them that we will review it, but we´ve asked them to give us a little time while we organize ourselves with our existing membership to make sure that we can deliver a quality service to our existing members.

Q.- Do you consider possible that the north part of Brazil could win entry in the CTO?

A.- Northern Brazil? I´m not so sure. That´s stretching it a little bit far.

Q.- Is there anything else you´d like to tell our readers?

A.- Well, we certainly appreciate the kind of work, the help and support you´ve been giving us throughout the years, particularly in the Spanish market. You´ve opened up our eyes in terms of where the possibilities are and we really appreciate that. You´re going to see us strategically grow more and more every single year.