External Challenges

• Global competition for tourism business
• The forces of globalization advocate the free movement of goods/services, capital and labour by opening up the world markets for trade.
• Globalization has expanded global corporate reach and control.
• The challenge is that the region now has to invest in meeting international standards.
• Worldwide the hospitality industry is having difficulty attracting motivated and dynamic employees because of its image as primarily offering low pay, low status jobs, with long, demanding working hours and difficult working conditions.
• Modern technology is rapidly changing the way business is conducted in travel and tourism. With the increasing use of computers by businesses to gain competitive advantage and the dramatic increase in the use of the Internet by travellers, tourism businesses have to invest in the new technologies and train their people in the use of these technologies to remain competitive.

Internal Challenges

• More Caribbean workers are entering the tourism workforce as a result of the region’s growing dependence on tourism and as other traditional economic sectors decline in importance.

• Similar to what is taking place worldwide, the region also has problems attracting highly motivated and dynamic employees who are willing to deal with unsociable working hours and demanding work and who may see few prospects for advancement.

• The Caribbean region has a high rate of unemployment or underemployment that governments have to deal with to avoid increasing negative social impacts.

• To satisfy the needs of the “new tourist” the region has to pay attention to the application of international standards in areas such as health and hygiene, the natural environment, occupational standards etc. and resources are required to help tourism businesses meet the required standards.

• The issues of employee retention and workforce sustainability are issues that must be addressed.

• The new tourism manager must also understand how to properly recruit and retain staff that can add value to the business, and he/she must focus more on developing his/her employees so that they can move ahead in their own careers within the tourism sector.

• The use of distance learning is revolutionizing campuses worldwide as, through the use of multiple technologies.

• Special attention needs to be paid to addressing the human resources needs of small, medium and micro tourism businesses in the region which make up the bulk of the sector, and which are locally owned and managed for the most part..” (Morgan, CTO, 2001)

In addition to understanding the complexity of tourism and its many challenges as highlighted above there is also the additional challenge of understanding business processes, community development, managing change and inter-agency collaborating within that change process. This all requires patience and an open-mind.

PIOJ document - Guidelines for South Coast Project -
prepared by Carolyn Hayle