TOURISM EXPANSION

Tourism, already a not insubstantial contributor to Trinidad and Tobago’s economic growth and employment levels, is poised to expand further with the recent announcement of a 55 percent increase in the number of scheduled cruise ship calls to TT this year, and last month’s inaugural flight by Continental Airlines from the United States to Tobago. Minister of Tourism, Senator Howard Chin Lee, in an interview with Newsday in December had advised that cruise ship arrivals would be 70 this year, up from last year’s 45, an increase of 55 percent. As a result, tens of millions of dollars will be pumped into the country, with the tourism dollars spread over a wide range of businesses, and will contribute to an increase in direct and indirect employment. The average Trinidad and Tobago citizen tends to think of tourists as persons armed with cameras and interested in purchasing souvenirs or heading for the beach, with taxi drivers or curio vendors being the principal beneficiaries. In the process tourism’s contribution to the country and its economy tends to be downplayed in the mind’s eye of the ordinary citizen. Nonetheless, the benefits of tourism to the country are there and undoubtedly great.
 
Beneficiaries of tourism are spread over a wide area of economic activity, and include not merely taxi drivers and curio vendors, but haberdashers, owners/operators of hotels and guest houses, entertainers, including chutney singers, calypsonians and steelband musicians, record dealers, service stations, restaurants, chefs, clerks, bake and shark vendors. In turn, because increased tourism often generates a need for new and/or expanded hotels and guest houses, it provides employment for architects, draughtsmen, contractors, masons, electricians, welders, carpenters, Trinidad Cement Limited, Caribbean Ispat Limited and downstream steel industries.

In addition, it generates revenue from airport landing fees, handling charges at air and sea ports for the national carrier, BWIA West Indies Airways Limited and Tobago Express. More aviation fuel is sold, and tourism also provides a fillip to agriculture, as well as adds to Trinidad and Tobago’s foreign exchange earnings. With last year’s closure of Caroni (1975) Limited, which resulted in the loss of approximately 10,000 jobs, and ipso facto the loss of income tax and value added tax, and the turning around of money within the economy which Caroni represented, the need for the generating of additional revenue and developing alternative employment in different areas, including that of tourism, assumes greater relevance.
 
A spin off of tourism has been the rental of completely furnished and well appointed homes and/or apartments, particularly in Tobago, for periods of up to six months to visitors from the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Germany. Many have swimming pools or are in “gated communities” with swimming pools. Some offer maid service as well. The vision and determined planning of the two principals, Wilson Minshall and Don Bain, when the Trinidad and Tobago Government opened the then King’s Wharf Passenger Centre in the late 1940s, laid the foundation for today’s tourism plant. Minshall and Bain believed that although the country had oil (natural gas was only fully exploited two decades later) tourism could be a crucial factor in the provision of even then needed jobs.

In 2003, the strategic intervention by Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Knowlson Gift, following on the issuing of an adverse travel advisory by the United Kingdom Government, led to the withdrawal of the advisory, and to UK cruise lines agreeing to make Trinidad and Tobago a regular port of call for the cruise ship season. Senator Gift’s representations, several decades after the Minshall-Bain vision, along with the work of TIDCO and the Ministry of Tourism, have been another powerful factor in the development and carrying forward of TT tourism with its implications for added Government revenue and additional jobs and income for Trinbagonians.