CARIBBEAN tourism officials will again examine the concept of co-operative marketing as a strategy to reverse the region’s shrinking visitor traffic at their four-day annual conference in The Bahamas next week.

According to the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO), sustained and aggressive marketing of the region as a single destination is increasingly being seen as one way to get visitors coming back to the region.

Caribbean tourism has been struggling to recover from the effects of September 11, 2001 when terrorists used hijacked commercial planes to bomb and destroy the World Trade Centre in New York and damage the Pentagon building in Washington DC.

The attacks not only led to a plunge in leisure travel, but also worsened economic recession in the United States, the Caribbean’s major market for tourists.

Visitor arrivals to the region were down 9.0 per cent between January and June 2002 following a 10.7 per cent drop for the Winter.

Against this backdrop, delegates attending next week’s 25th annual Caribbean Tourism Conference (CTC-25) on Grand Bahama Island will re-examine the co-operative marketing strategy at a session titled ‘A Non-Traditional View Of Co-operative Marketing’.

“This most instructive and provocative topic serves as just one of the important reasons for travel agents and tourism industry professionals to attend the conference, an event that gives participants the opportunity to be part of reinventing the region’s tourism industry,” said Hugh Riley, the CTO’s director of marketing for the Americas.

The hour-and-a-half session will involve an international panel of industry experts, moderated by Simon Suarez, president of the Caribbean Hotel Association, discussing the best practices in search of creative ways of allocating co-operative marketing funds.

Earlier this year, CTO member states, after years of debate, finally pooled approximately US$16 million to fund a co-operative advertising campaign for the region.

The CTO’s deputy secretary-general, Karen Ford-Warner, while admitting that the principle of pooled resources is generally accepted, said that “an increasingly competitive market is demanding new approaches and non-traditional ways of communicating the message to potential visitors that the Caribbean is still the best warm weather destination in the world”.

The session at next week’s conference will, therefore, probe the most cost-effective methods of combining public and private sector funds with the common objective of stimulating the market and producing sales. It will debate the pros and cons of joint ventures and discuss possible conflicts of interest.

CTC-25 opens on October 28 at Our Lucaya Beach and Golf Resort. The theme of the conference is ‘Reinventing Caribbean Tourism’.