The recent destructive rampage across parts of the Caribbean by Hurricane Beryl would appear to have done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of Caribbean countries in their pursuit to continue to take measures to promote their tourism ‘offerings.’ Weeks after the Hurricane had made its unwelcome presence felt to telling effects in the region the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) was sitting down at its State-of-the-Industry Conference in the Cayman Islands seeking to set aside the travails of the Hurricane and to focus instead on a report on the forum which has as its focus discourses centred around the theme: “Tourism growth – in land and sea visitor arrivals, accommodations development and infrastructure building.”
If one might have felt that the Caribbean would allocate more time to licking its wounds and contemplating the toll that Beryl had taken on the physical infrastructure and wider economies of the respective Caribbean countries, it appeared, according to the report that the region, as a whole, was much more concerned with the State of the Industry. Nor, it seemed, that the unquestionable devastating toll that Beryl took on the region appeared to unduly preoccupy the forum. The meeting, it appeared, preferred to focus on the fact that a number of named countries in the region, including the Cayman Islands, the conference’s host nation, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and the U.S. Virgin Islands all reported “increased year-over-year visitor arrivals growth.”
