In my early days travelling the Caribbean with Tradewinds, my head immersed in music, tourism to me was essentially a somewhat monolithic operation, made up largely of airplanes, hotels, white-sand beaches, and blue water; that’s how it struck me. I saw the tourist as essentially someone coming to these Caribbean havens – St Maarten, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, etc – looking for those things. As one travel agent in America told me, “People come in here to pick out a holiday. A major question for them is ‘How far is the hotel from the beach?’ Many of them ask you that even before they ask you price.” I thought that was the tourism package – plane, hotel, beach; maybe car rental. Living in the Cayman Islands from 1980 onwards, and then married to the country’s Director of Tourism, I learned better. I came to see that
