Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Tourism Trinidad Lim­it­ed (TTL) wants Google’s help to pro­mote pos­i­tive news about Trinidad and To­ba­go through its search en­gines.

The rev­e­la­tion came from TTL chair­man Clif­ford Hamil­ton as he spoke about the threat the coun­try’s crime rate posed to tourism be­fore a Pub­lic Ac­counts En­ter­pris­es Com­mit­tee pan­el yes­ter­day.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing crime was a “pub­lic men­ace” to the coun­try, he said the goal is to coun­ter­act the in­ter­na­tion­al per­cep­tion.

“We are hop­ing that we would be able to en­ter in­to some agree­ment with Google, where­by, in terms of the search en­gines, if we give them con­tent that’s pos­i­tive, when you Google Trinidad, what comes up first are those pos­i­tive things that we’re say­ing about the coun­try or oth­er peo­ple are say­ing about the des­ti­na­tion,” Hamil­ton said.

“So, we’re look­ing at that in terms of how we can help to min­imise the in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al per­cep­tion of crime in Trinidad.”

De­spite this, he not­ed that feed­back re­ceived by TTL sug­gests that in­ter­na­tion­al tourists are not as con­cerned about crime in the coun­try.

Asked by com­mit­tee chair­man Wade Mark how crime was im­pact­ing T&T’s im­age in the tourism in­dus­try, Hamil­ton said, “Thank you for that ques­tion. It’s rather time­ly be­cause we just had a meet­ing last week with some of the stake­hold­ers.

“The re­sponse that was prob­a­bly the gen­er­al re­sponse is that they do not see the crime af­fect­ing the vis­i­tors. These are peo­ple they work with, who come to Trinidad, who’ve been to Trinidad...re­peat­ed­ly and they’ve nev­er...en­coun­tered any crime. There are some folks who prob­a­bly—and I think de­pends on where they go and where they take per­sons—say that per­sons are con­cerned about crime but the gen­er­al con­sen­sus from that stake­hold­er meet­ing we had last week was that they are not con­cerned about crime and...the vis­i­tors they have are not con­cerned about crime.”

TTL’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Car­la Cu­pid, said an an­nu­al av­er­age of 304,000 tourists vis­it­ed Trinidad be­tween 2015 and 2019. She said 42 per cent came from the Unit­ed States, 14 per cent from Cana­da, 20 per cent from Cari­com and the Caribbean, 14 per cent from Eu­rope, sev­en per cent from Latin Amer­i­ca and three per cent vis­it­ed from oth­er parts of the world.

She said di­as­po­ra and those vis­it­ing friends and rel­a­tives ac­count­ed for 40 to 45 per cent of ar­rivals.