ROSE HALL, St James — A leading international tourism marketing expert says Jamaica is not doing enough to market the island as a tourism destination.

“The Jamaica product is culturally a very rich one. It is very diverse and it has lots of resources so they need to take advantage of that in creating tourism products, and to engage the customers,” said Professor Dimitrois Buhalis, a marketing expert with specialisation in information communication technology applications in tourism, travel, hospitality and leisure industries.

“My experience is that Jamaica is a traditional destination and that it is not using technology to its advantage and that it has a long way to go in terms of marketing the destination and packaging the product. For example, you [Jamaica] do not take enough advantage of your reggae heritage, you don’t take advantage of your pirate stories….. and all of those things are there to be explored and to take advantage of them in a way so that you can maximise your engagement with your customers.”

Professor Buhalis, who is also deputy director of the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research at Bournemount University in England, was speaking to the Jamaica Observer on Monday following his presentation at the third International Tourism UWI Tourism Conference at the Iberostar Rose Hall Beach Hotel in St James.

He argued that because the world is moving into an era where different ways of engagement and interaction are being used, dynamic and strategic marketing will be needed to drive growth in the tourism market.

“What Jamaica needs to do now is to get the right expertise to help the Government develop the product and the services, to educate the workforce and to make sure that the investors understand where the trends are on a global base, and make sure that they reflect those trends in the way they operate,” he explained.

Arguing that Jamaica is a wonderful place, Professor Buhalis emphasised, however, that it can do much better that what it is doing now.

“… For the time being it [Jamaica] is a very traditional ‘come along stay on the beach, dance a little bit, kill yourself with food and drink and get the hell out of here’, and that is not engaging, it’s not about looking into the communities, and it’s not about looking into its heritage,” he said.

More than 60 participants from across the Caribbean, Europe and North America attended the two-day conference, which ended yesterday.

It was staged by the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM), in collaboration with the prestigious Ryerson University of Canada under the theme: Tourism and Innovation: reinventing, revolutionising, transforming.

According to chair of the conference’s planning committee Eritha Huntley-Lewis, the confab formed part of the MSBM’s commitment to ensure that “we continue to do research in tourism because the reality is that tourism is the most critical industry in the Caribbean.

“When we look at employment and even economic activities, tourism is a primary industry in most of the Caribbean countries, so the hope that we have is to continue the discourse in terms of researching in tourism,” said Huntley-Lewis, a lecturer in tourism management at the MSBM.

She argued that the theme under which the conference was held this year is very appropriate.

“When we think of where the tourism industry is now we realise that the world is changing and it is not just affected by technology, but there are a lot of social and economic forces that are affecting the world, so we really have to find ways to survive and that’s why the conference is so important,” she told the opening of the conference.

She noted that a number of the papers presented at the conference will be made available at the MSBM’s tourism unit, noting that “one of the challenges that Caribbean tourism has is that we don’t have enough information about us published, so we are hoping that we can address that through this conference”.