Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands – The British Virgin Islands Tourist Board (BVITB) has started to put systems in place to ensure that the territory, as a premier vacation destination, is not impacted negatively by the new United States passport regulation.
The U.S. government has announced that effective January 1, 2006, U.S. Citizens visiting the Caribbean will be required to be in possession of a valid US passport to re-enter the United States.
An economic impact study, conducted by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) on behalf of the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA), considered the market share of visitors from the United States to the Caribbean and the percentage of those visitors that do not use a valid U.S. passport. The study examined these figures against total visitor export earnings in the region, which total US$20.7 billion and concluded that in the Caribbean, as much as US$2.6 billion of visitor export earnings and more than 188,000 travel and tourism jobs could be at risk.
While the study concluded that 50% of US visitors to the BVI do not use passports, the BVI Government’s Development Planning Unit (DPU) reports that for the year’s 2003/2004 approximately 92.4% of US citizens visiting the Territory entered with passports. Both the study and DPU report that 64% of all visitors to the Territory are US citizens.
“This is much better than we expected given the numbers reported in the WTTC study. Therefore, we expect the economic impact on the Territory to be much less than anticipated,” said Director of Tourism, Kedrick Malone, commenting on the DPU figures.
Director Malone said, “The Territory welcomes hundreds of new visitors each year and even if there is not as great an impact as originally anticipated, we would still definitely be impacted by this new regulation. The market has become very much a last minute market and last minute travelers seldom have passport credentials.”
He said that in addition to fully supporting the lobby by the CHA to give the region’s tourism industry more time to prepare for this change, the Tourist Board has placed an advertisement in the Welcome Magazine, placed notices on the Tourist Board website, and produced a flyer to be displayed at trade shows throughout the United States.
“CHA can appreciate U.S. concern for its security, but cannot lose sight of the impact of the new regulations on Caribbean travel and tourism, which will be a permanent realignment of traffic, with spontaneous, last minute travel significantly reduced,” said CHA President Berthia Parle. “Our position advocates an extension of time for the Caribbean to the same introductory date as Mexico and Canada, January 1, 2008, to allow the regions tourism to prepare better.”
This is one of the items to be discussed when industry officials gather at the Hyatt Regency in Miami, Florida, June 26-29 for CHIC 2005, the Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference.
