Tourism Marketing on the Internet

Caribbean Web marketing politics cannot escape the already heavily sexually driven signature of Caribbean culture in export. The Internet’s already sexually coated and undergirded pop-up construction makes it an almost ideal location for the playing out of some Caribbean stock symbols. It is true that notions of the Caribbean have been forged and established over time.

Today many more people rely on western popular culture and media to provide them with images and tracks of experience that represent “the Caribbean”. The Internet is a major facility for simulating what the Caribbean is all about. But in some ways, the Internet and popular technologies have gone ahead of the game, seeking to seize control of the very thing that they claim to represent.

A brief examination of tourism marketing practices on the Internet illustrates the extent to which Caribbean societies have begun to internalize their own image and how they might have begun to regard their position in the world. An examination of marketing politics within the cruise industry might also provide clearer insight about how Web simulation anticipates a future of virtual and real control.

It would be too great a task to discuss at length here, the range of Web sites devoted to tourism throughout the region. The reality is that tourism entities, ranging from small hotels to car rental companies have embarked on offering their services and facilities to tourists without much care for larger national imperatives.

Conversely, some other entrepreneurs have sought to regularize and centralize their products and services by collaborating with other associations, sharing space on the Internet, or purchasing links on larger, more established Web sites.

Many national tourism boards have established their dedicated sites through which they have sought to control and shape the presence of their national product in cyberspace.

Over the Internet, it is not easy to differentiate the more-developed Caribbean tourism locations. Many of the sites make use of various technologies that can give the illusion of having the capacity to deliver the goods to all who visit from across the world. Most sites, government sanctioned and otherwise, still invests heavily in visual impact and imagery, with emphasis on stock photos and slide shows using dissolving frames.

Text is crucial to Web marketing, because sound technology on the Internet is not always a stable medium for advertising. Like moving video, Internet sound is still heavily dependent on a range of factors. Among these factors are considerations of the various users and the range of computer or wireless systems they will employ to access the World Wide Web.

Text is therefore still a dependable medium within virtual transaction. Streaming audio and video are indeed trendy facilities that demonstrate the power of technology, and accordingly too the wizardry and near magic that should appeal to tourism interests, but these tools are at times too quirky to be invested in by marketing agencies within the business of tourism.

Caribbean tourism-related pages are therefore safe sites of technological display. This mistrust of the Internet’s imagined potential reflects a shrewd awareness of what is and isn’t possible in the real, hard world of techno-marketing.

If the Internet is a medium of illusion, then few entities have better exploited the mystique of the Caribbean within this technological matrix than has the cruise industry. Of course, the cruise industry is owned by large transnational corporations and players. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Caribbean tourist destinations were locked in contentious debate with the cruise ship industry over the proposal by some islands in the region to increase the head tax on cruise ships.

The cruise industry resisted and even threatened to boycott some islands of the region. The region could not unite on this matter. The large conglomerates had again won out. For, as they have proclaimed on some sites, no one knows the Caribbean as they do!

The effect of much of this marketing is that it inscribes fixed notions about who is a tourist and who is a native. But the control of the region’s images and facilities through the virtual domain also explains why the cruise industry reacts disdainfully to any suggestion that the region should derive greater benefits from the tourism transaction.

For, after all, in the virtual domain, the reality is that the cruise industry is preeminent. The owners of the cruise liners are foremost. The islands hardly have an existence without the presence of the cruise industry. It is instructive how the virtual arena can so starkly reflect the underlying tensions and power struggles within the tourism industry, and wider geo-political relations.

Curwen Best (PhD) is Senior Lecturer (Popular Culture, Literary and Cultural Studies) UWI, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados.