Caribbean aims for 'total visitor satisfaction'

By Jasmine Sahoye

 

In an effort to ensure that visitors to Caribbean tourism destinations receive the best products and services, the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) has instituted a pilot survey in six countries to gauge what it calls total visitor satisfaction.

The total visitor satisfaction survey, which has already started in Barbados, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica, is aimed at getting guests to rate their experience.  In the long term, each member country will become involved.

Hugh Riley, CTO’s Secretary General says the survey was developed “to determine how visitors are using our products, our service, our hospitality and what their reaction is to it. The program has been branded guestpitality, in order words, the program is on hospitality but the focus is on the guest.”

He told The Camera that the survey allows guests to rate their experience against seven categories, including accommodation, sites and attractions and safety and security. “When a particular destination hits a specific mark – 85 per cent – they then can actually be guestpitality rated. There must be a particular score that must be met in each category to make sure that the destination is guestpitality rated.”

Riley noted that the program has two intentions – to allow the world to understand that the Caribbean is paying a great deal of attention to visitor satisfaction and allow each destination to constantly be upgrading and improving the services that they offer.

Meanwhile, the long awaited Caribbean diaspora website is up and running but according to Riley there is still some other components that are being developed.

The Caribbean diaspora is an important and integral part of the Caribbean tourism sector, both as visitors to the region, and, of equal importance, as ambassadors or the Caribbean, the website states.

“One Caribbean Diaspora is the place where you will see some innovative and special programs that will invite people from the Caribbean Diaspora, our friends and relatives, people within our sphere of influence to come there and take advantage of very special programs that are designed to attract people of Caribbean heritage back to the Caribbean for vacation,” Riley says while updating The Camera.

This website is the beginning of the journey towards rediscovering home.