Bigger is not necessarily better

Oct 09, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There is a particular danger when tourism people gather in a room to discuss the future of tourism. Before anybody notices, somebody is talking about luxury resorts, billion-dollar investments, global sporting events and infrastructure on a scale that would make Dubai look like a village rum shop.

That appears to be the direction President Irfaan Ali was pointing Caribbean tourism stakeholders when he addressed the Caribbean Tourism Organisation’s State of the Tourism Industry Conference in Georgetown on Wednesday.

The President’s central argument was that the Caribbean cannot continue relying on natural beauty alone. The region must invest, innovate, improve connectivity, develop new experiences and compete for major international events. He pointed to the Middle East’s enormous investments in luxury hospitality, entertainment and sporting events and suggested that the Caribbean should collectively identify major global events it wants to attract.

Somewhere between the first luxury resort and the tenth international sporting extravaganza, somebody ought to ask a rather unfashionable question: Who exactly are we trying to impress?

The Caribbean already has one of the world’s most extraordinary tourism products. It has beaches, mountains, forests, reefs, rivers, music, food, festivals, cricket, history, culture, literature, rum, carnival and people whose warmth cannot be manufactured. And yet somehow the response to this extraordinary natural and cultural inheritance is increasingly to build something that looks like somewhere else. Apparently, the Caribbean must now compete with the Middle East by becoming more like the Middle East. This is rather like telling a calypso singer that his problem is that he doesn’t sound enough like an opera singer.

The Middle East has enormous financial resources. Some of its countries have sovereign wealth funds capable of writing cheques that Caribbean governments can only dream about. So why exactly should the Caribbean enter an infrastructure arms race with them?

President Ali himself acknowledged that it would be “very difficult” for the Caribbean to invest in tourism in the same way as the Middle East. That should perhaps have been the beginning of the discussion. Because the Caribbean’s competitive advantage is not that it can build the biggest artificial resort, the most spectacular stadium or the most expensive hotel. It is that we already have what people are paying to escape to find.

There is also something slightly troubling about the relentless elevation of “luxury tourism.” Of course, the Caribbean should welcome wealthy visitors. If a millionaire wants to spend a fortnight in a Caribbean hotel, eat expensive lobster and pay somebody US$200 to carry a suitcase 30 yards, nobody should stand in his way. But tourism policy cannot become a contest to see which island can attract the richest people. The region has to ask how tourism benefits ordinary Caribbean people.

A small guesthouse employs local people. A taxi driver earns. A fisherman supplies a restaurant. A farmer sells produce. A musician performs. A craft maker sells something. A tour guide takes visitors into a community. That is tourism. And it is precisely why the theme of SOTIC 2026 — “Tourism Futures: Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive” matters. Inclusive tourism cannot mean building an enormous luxury property and then employing the local population to polish the silverware. And most of the food and senior staff on these luxury hotels are imported, food not sourced from local farmers.

Yes, also the Caribbean should host international sporting events. But where will the money come from to build the stadium, to maintain it, to pay for security, transportation and to fill the hotel rooms. Investors do not like to carry these risks.  Will the taxpayer be eventually presented with the bill.

The President is right that the region needs better air and sea connectivity. He is right that Caribbean countries should cooperate rather than operate as 14 or 20 tourism islands competing against one another. He is right that technology, resilience and new tourism experiences matter. But bigger is not automatically better. The Caribbean does not need to become Dubai with palm trees. It needs to become a better version of the Caribbean.

Let Barbados be Barbados. Let Jamaica be Jamaica. Let Guyana be Guyana. Let Dominica sell its nature. Let Trinidad sell its culture. Let St Lucia sell its mountains. Let Antigua sell its beaches. And let the region package these differences rather than trying to homogenise them into a collection of luxury resorts with different flags outside.

The great tourism opportunity is not to make the Caribbean look more like its competitors. It is to make the world understand why there is nowhere quite like the Caribbean. The future of Caribbean tourism should not be a race to see who can build the biggest playground for the richest visitor. It should be a race to see who can extract the greatest value from what we already uniquely possess while making sure that value reaches the people who live here.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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