St. Maarten Tourist Bureau Calls for Closer Ties between Government, Private Sector Partners

Edward Dest, Acting Director of Tourism for St. Maarten opened the recent Annual Overseas Marketing Representatives Meeting calling for "closer co-operation with our partners" to improve both the tourism product and generate more visitors to St. Maarten.

The reasons for this gathering is for the public sector, along with the overseas representatives, to jointly review and develop strategies in moving St. Maarten's tourism forward with the private sector. "While we might not agree on every action to be taken, the bottom line is that the actions are in the interest of St. Maarten tourism in general," said Mr. Dest.

Dest went on to call for St. Maarten to re-invent itself in order to remain competitive: "I call it St. Maarten 5.0.  Why? We had the new port which was St. Maarten 2.0, the Boardwalk was St. Maarten 3.0, the airport improvement project was St. Maarten 4.0 and now we need to reinvent ourselves in order to once again be a preferred vacation destination.”

"St. Maarten 5.0 entails providing better service in general on St. Maarten, and yes, that includes the service government provides.

"St. Maarten 5.0 entails the upgrading of hotels to be more competitive with other hotels in the region.

"St. Maarten 5.0 also means that government has to do its part for St. Maarten to once again achieve the preferred and safe vacation destination status.

"St. Maarten 5.0 means closer working with our partners for the betterment of St. Maarten.

"St. Maarten 5.0 means that government and private sector need to do a better  job in the sharing of information."

 Dest's remarks to the attendees included the following:

"In St. Maarten, the tourism contribution to the GDP is estimated at US$831 million or 85% and supports an estimated 14,000 jobs.

"During the first six months of the year, we had an increase in stayover arrivals of 1.4% when compared to 2012.   However, regarding cruise tourism, St. Maarten experienced a decrease of 5.6% attributed partially to the overall decline in consumer trust after several cruise lines had major mishaps.

"There was a 19% decrease in the 2013 tourism budget when compared to 2012.  With a smaller operating budget this year, the St. Maarten Tourist Bureau  had to be more creative then before in terms of stretching the available funds. We cannot advertise blindly in major magazines not knowing what our return on investment is.

"We focused on trying to stay closer to the customer as well as what our return on investment would yield.  We have Facebook pages and websites in four different languages, English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, thereby trying to stay closer to the customer.  In a short time we will also see our revamped website, www.VacationStMaarten.com, in various languages.

"In collaboration with the Department of Statistics, this year we started quarterly exit surveys.

"We are also looking at having an online St. Maarten Travel Agent Academy to educate more travel agents on how to promote and sell our destination. This should be in place by the fourth quarter of this year.

"We are also working with our destination partners, St. Martin and Anguilla, in further developing the South American market.   We brought an additional 40 tour operators just for SMART from South America and Puerto Rico in order to further drive business to the destination.  We look forward to continuing to jointly work with Anguilla and St. Martin on other projects.

"We will have some additional air service this season. Delta will be having a daily flight from JFK as well as adding a flight from Atlanta. We are working with Copa Airlines to hopefully announce additional flights from Panama. (Copa Airlines in the meantime added 2 weekly flights from Panama to St. Maarten). Winair indicated that they will be getting two ATR-72 aircrafts to further enhance and expand the destinations they service.

"My vision of St. Maarten is that of a Disney World. You come, you spend, you have a good time with wonderful memories and don't complain how much money you spent until you reach home."