Any country that depends heavily on any form of tourism for the survival of its economy must know that it has to stay particularly alert and make every possible effort to ensure that its product is a versatile, solid and SAFE ONE.
Along with all of this, they would want to always ensure that visitors to the country are made to feel very welcome and very safe at all times.
There are some countries, however, that continue to have their tourism product tested, sometimes by natural disasters, but quite often these industries are threatened by indiscriminate acts of violence against visitors by the very citizens and residents of the country who are dependent on the visitors for their livelihood.
There are some tourism destinations that make a concerted effort to ensure that bad news related to the visitors’ experiences are kept very low-keyed. I’m not expecting the Newspapers and the Media houses to abandon their responsibility to carry the news as it happens, but there must be some type of understanding – where the lines need to be drawn. Every Dominican should making a constant effort to protect, to enforce, to do damage control so that the tourism product can continue to do well.
Tourism officials need to make it their business to make sure they find a way to let visitors that the very same things that happen in their neighbourhoods at home can happen everywhere else in the world and that they need to be aware of their surroundings at all times. We can’t wait until something bad happens to start educating visitors, by then it would be too late…much too late to save our fragile tourism industry.
There must be consistent tourism programmes aimed at getting the people to understand they need to try and preserve the industry, and that everyone has a role to play in ensuring all visitors to the Dominica are made to feel very welcome and very safe at all times, whether it is cruise or stay-over visitors.
