ORANJESTAD, Aruba – Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, is lobbying for the design of a CTO template to enable destinations to do a more meaningful job attracting and embracing the “Visiting Friends and Relatives” (VFR) market, that is Diaspora Caribbean nationals living in the marketplace in the US, Canada, UK and further afield.
The VFR market not only helps the economic survival of air carriers that cash in on their “high yield” fares, he said, but increasingly, Caribbean-Americans, Caribbean-Brits and Caribbean-Canadians for that matter, are checking their luggage into hotels, to seek refuge from packed family homes when travelling “back a yard.”
While they eventually do visit “Granny” and “Papa” in spite of space constraints and the inevitable family debate on the war in Iraq or another excitable issue, perhaps West Indies cricket or local politics, they also spend big bucks supporting local businesses, like supermarkets, banks and rum shops, injecting precious foreign exchange into the local economy, Vandepool-Wallace said at the just concluded tourism conference, CTC 27, held in Aruba from Oct. 17-20.
ﾓWe have taken it for granted, and we took our eye off the ball believing that visitors are people other than those people,” said Vanderpool-Wallace who underscored the link between Diaspora and tourism as an economic development tool.
Vanderpool-Wallace, one of the region’s top tourism strategists, also believes the region should put more focus on serving the African American market. Executives from both the Jamaica Tourist Board and Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and Celebrity Cruises, who attended the conference, agreed with him.
“By reason of a common heritage it is the next logical extension,” he said. “We have put our generic products instead of having products that will specifically relate to a specific market,” said the Bahamian, who recommended that the Caribbean serve up cultural offerings which appeal to this market segment. ﾖ
By Bevan Springer, Hardbeatnews.com
