December 9, 2013

Dear Sir,

The December 5th edition of The Royal Gazette, published some enlightening and encouraging statistics regarding Tourism arrivals.

This trend could be attributable to a couple of factors; the Global economy recovering and or the 2010 Tourism Plan, in particular the advertising bearing fruit.

Figures show that 80,852 people arrived a year ago — and almost 2,000 more this year, for the third quarter.

Another ‘trend’ that has become noticeable, is the preferred choice or style of accommodation of the air visitor.

An analysis of visitors revealed that housekeeping accommodations saw the largest relative increase of 13.6 percent. The number of guests staying at private homes rose by 11.8 percent.

However, there was a worrying figure for resort hotels — a decline of 1.8 percent in reservation bookings.

Visitors staying at the smaller hotels increased 1.4 %, while the occupancy level at guest houses fractionally increased 0.4 percent.

My perception of these statistics reveal what I have been ‘touting’ all along, that the way forward to help increase air arrivals, is to promote the ‘vacation apartments’ and ‘bed & breakfast’ accommodations. There are two websites in particular that offer these types, bermudarentals.com — having approximately 125 properties, and homeaway.com — with some 104 listed.

As Tourism is high on the agenda lately, it is hoped that the Tourism Authority will seriously review the statistics and trends.

The chairman has stated we need to increase and enhance the physical product/infrastructure in order to make the Island more appealing to potential visitors and investors.

I say we need to be very careful going forward. What the figures reveal, is that large resort accommodations, are not necessarily the choice of majority discerning travellers. Big name brand hotels appeal to a certain demographic, which apparently are a minority.

Therefore, if it’s a majority that we want to attract, consider the ‘stats’ and trends. The majority demographic also spends money, and if there are more of them, well, do the math.

Glenn Chase