An­dre Alexan­der

T&T's tourism in­dus­try is lag­ging be­hind the rest of the Caribbean says Tourism Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe who is call­ing for more fo­cus to be placed on its de­vel­op­ment.

Cud­joe, in the fea­ture ad­dress at the sym­po­sium Tourism is My Busi­ness host­ed joint­ly by the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (TDC) and the Small Tourism En­ter­pris­es Project (STEP) at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain, said: "We have be­come very de­pen­dent and very com­fort­able re­ly­ing on the en­er­gy sec­tor and in this cur­rent time we have learned that we can't do that any­more."

The min­is­ter said for many years the call for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and in­vest­ments in the tourism sec­tor had been ig­nored caus­ing T&T's tourism sec­tor to fall fur­ther be­hind coun­tries in the re­gion.

"Over the year's red flags were be­ing raised and the alarm was be­ing sound­ed that we need­ed to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my but we be­came com­pla­cent so that even as the alarms went off, the calls for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion were ig­nored," Cud­joe said.

"Now we have no oth­er choice but to get up and move ag­gres­sive­ly to put the nec­es­sary mea­sures in place to repo­si­tion the tourism sec­tor. For this gov­ern­ment, the tourism sec­tor is a strate­gic de­vel­op­ment pri­or­i­ty."

She said a change of mind­set is need­ed: "For many years jobs in the tourism sec­tor, be it in ho­tels or restau­rants, were seen as jobs for poor peo­ple or peo­ple who didn't ex­cel aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly.

"To a large ex­tent to­day that type of think­ing is still alive so are con­front­ed with the chal­lenge of hav­ing to change the mind­set as it re­lates to build­ing a ca­reer in the tourism in­dus­try."

Cud­joe cit­ed sta­tis­tics from the World Tourism Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WTO) which show that growth in the glob­al tourism in­dus­try is ex­pect­ed to out­strip growth in the glob­al econ­o­my over next decade.

She said: "In 2015, trav­el and tourism con­tributed US$7.2 tril­lion to world GDP with the sec­tor sup­port­ing 284 mil­lion jobs and grow­ing by 3.1 per cent. It is pro­ject­ed that trav­el and tourism will out­per­form the glob­al econ­o­my through­out the next decade grow­ing by an av­er­age of four per cent an­nu­al­ly through the next ten years."

The min­is­ter added that the Caribbean had set new records in terms of spend­ing and tourist ar­rivals and tourism grew by an es­ti­mat­ed sev­en per cent to 28.7 mil­lion vis­its, much high­er than the ex­pect­ed 4-5 per cent pre­dict­ed and above the glob­al rate of growth.

"Vis­i­tors to the re­gion spent over US$1 bil­lion more than they spent in 2014 con­tribut­ing to ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$30 bil­lion to Caribbean economies which is 4.2 per cent high­er than the US$28.8 bil­lion spent in the pre­vi­ous year." she said.