Multi-Destination: The Key to a New Tourism

Multi-destination tourism is conceived as a potentially effective and profitable way of expanding and deepening economic activity in more than one community through the expansion of the population of those communities by short stay persons who are on a single trip, and who have a disposition for expenditure on services that provide value.

Two of the basic requirements for facilitating multi-destination tourism in the region are the consistently reliable and reasonably priced intra-regional airline services and the efficient and customer service oriented facilities at ports of entry.

Meanwhile a recent forum on multi-destination tourism hosted by the Regional Council of Martinique recognized that while this initiative must be driven by the private sector, the support of tourism policy makers is crucial to its success.

This is what Jasmin Garraway, director of sustainable tourism of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS),wrote recently about the multi-destination concept in a document that bore the brunt of most deliberations at the recently concluded Caribbean Marketplace 2006 in Puerto Rico´s San Juan.

“Though the tourist destinations of the Greater Caribbean Region embrace a variety of cultures and boast great variety in both natural and manmade attractions, they all recognize that tourism is a highly competitive industry and that there is competition from destinations within the region as well as from those outside of the region.

“Destinations in the region must therefore employ innovative marketing techniques and offer excellent standards of service in order to ensure the success and sustainability of the industry in the long term.

“The achievement of sustainability in tourism is one objective of the Association of Caribbean States´ initiative to develop the Sustainable Tourism Zone of the Greater Caribbean (STZC). The zone is defined as ´a geographically determined cultural, socio-economic and biologically rich and diverse unit, in which tourism development will depend on sustainability and the principles of the integration, co-operation and consensus, aimed at facilitating the integrated development of the Caribbean´.”

She adds that the ACS recognizes that in order to achieve sustainability in tourism, appropriate tourism strategies will have to be developed.

“Multi-destination tourism has been identified as having the potential to advance the realization of the Sustainable Tourism Zone, as well as to enhance single destination tourism and intra-regional tourism.”

And it does seem, this time that the individual territories are sold on the one-destination theory, the need for private and public sector to work together if there is any seriousness to accomplishing this. Then there is the perennial sore point of the regional airlines.