Interview: CEO of Caribbean Tourism Organization on Marketing the Region as One Destination

Editor’s Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with CEOs of destination marketing organizations where we discuss the future of their organizations and the evolving strategies for attracting visitors. Read all the interviews as they come out here. This continues our series of CEO interviews that began with online travel CEOs in Future of Travel Booking (now an e-book), and continued with hotel CEOs in the Future of the Guest Experience series (which is also an e-book). When thinking about the Caribbean it's often the larger islands of the Barbados, Jamaica and Puerto Rico that come to mind. This is one of the challenges of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) where the mission is to market the region as one destination and make sure the household name destinations don't claim the largest slices of its marketing budget. While it's not clear to what extent this happens the region as a whole had a record year for tourist arrivals in 2014 and so far this year has seen more records. The Caribbean welcomed 26.3 million visitors in 2014 which was a 5.6% increase over the previous year. For the first quarter of 2015, the CTO announced it's seeing a 6% increase over the first quarter of 2014. Skift recently sat down with Hugh Riley, the CEO of the Caribbean Tourism Organization, to talk about visitor arrivals, air capacity growth to the region and the impact of Cuba thawing relations with the U.S. An edited version of the interview follows: Skift: What's the status with the "One Caribbean" messaging that your organization employs when marketing the Caribbean? Are you seeing success from that rather than calling out individual islands? Also, how do you ensure islands like Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas don't hog all of the marketing budget and that money trickles down to smaller islands? Hugh Riley: I think this is an important goal and in pretty much every ad opportunity we have we talk about “one sea, one voice, one Caribbean.” The real meaning of this very important tenant is that the Caribbean brand is stronger than any individual country brand in the region. To the extent that people first wrap their minds around a vacation in “the Caribbean,” we believe this is the starting point. We would much rather have them decide on the Caribbean this year than on some other region of the world. We think that once we can attract people’s attention and lure them into our region of course the next decision is