Raphael John-Lall

The To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion (TH­TA) would like to see more mar­ket­ing dol­lars al­lo­cat­ed to help pro­mote the is­land as a tourism des­ti­na­tion, pres­i­dent Chris James told the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day.Com­ment­ing on the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) 2015 Bud­get pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Sec­re­tary Joel Jack on Mon­day, James said: "All ar­eas were cov­ered and of course we would like more mar­ket­ing dol­lars, but un­til we in­crease our qual­i­ty room stock I un­der­stand the lim­i­ta­tions.

"I be­lieve we have to keep fo­cused so that we get more year-round air­lift. The tourism in­dus­try has to plan well in ad­vance so we need mar­ket­ing bud­gets 12 months in ad­vance with con­tin­gen­cies for tac­ti­cal cam­paigns. We need a strong brand­ing-and-aware­ness cam­paign. We are al­so em­bark­ing on ad­di­tion­al cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing, so our aims are clear, tourism can be a great as­set to T&T's econ­o­my."

Jack pre­sent­ed a $5.6 bil­lion bud­get which in­clud­ed over­all re­cur­rent es­ti­mates of $3.13 bil­lion, an in­crease of $163.86 mil­lion over the fis­cal 2014 re­quest to the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment and $1.31 bil­lion over last year's re­vised es­ti­mates.James said: "Sev­er­al ini­tia­tives, in­clud­ing sup­port for small­er prop­er­ties, mar­ket­ing, in­fra­struc­ture im­prove­ments, along with the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment's ini­tia­tives such as the gov­ern­ment loan guar­an­tee, should as­sist in get­ting tourism in To­ba­go back on the in­ter­na­tion­al map."

James said the TH­TA con­tin­ues to work close­ly and col­lab­o­rate with the THA with month­ly stake­hold­er meet­ings, "mak­ing sure our views are heard and tak­en in­to ac­count." "Tourism was and can be again a ma­jor eco­nom­ic dri­ver for To­ba­go and by ex­ten­sion T&T, the re­ten­tion of the tourism dol­lar with­in T&T is over 70 cents in every dol­lar spent, so in terms of di­rect and in­di­rect em­ploy­ment the po­ten­tial is enor­mous."

James said the TH­TA is hap­py with the fo­cus the THA places on tourism and ac­knowl­edges the "com­pet­i­tive in­dus­try they op­er­ate in."To­ba­go's tourism needs con­tin­ued brand­ing and mar­ket­ing which are all ad­dressed in the bud­get. The al­lo­ca­tion for air­lift mar­ket­ing sup­port is crit­i­cal to al­low us com­pete in a very com­pet­i­tive in­dus­try."