In a front page Barbados Advocate headline on 29th March ‘Tourism industry bouncing back’ and again in an article dated 1st April ‘Tourism bouncing back’ are classic examples.

‘Senator Grant told the estimates in the Senate that visitor arrivals in January this year increased by 3.5 per cent and while those in February grew by 4.8 per cent’.

But if inflation is currently 5.1 per cent, where is the growth?

The article went on to state “the official said the decline of 2005 was due to certain challenging circumstances’. Have our neighbours not also been faced with similar challenges and why have they managed to overcome them so much more successfully?

St. Lucia for instance is boasting a hotel occupancy rate of 68 per cent compared with our ‘record year’ in 2004 of just 49.7 per cent.

According the Ministry of Labour and Social Security in their Digest of Statistics 2004 edition, 14 per cent all tourism jobs or one in seven were lost between 2002 and 2004.

Does a loss of over 2,000 tourism jobs indicate to you that the ‘Tourism industry is bouncing back’?

Finally, the Senator quoted ‘In 2004 the average spend was US$126’ and “in 2005 the average spend was US$143’. Where is the evidence to support these figures and how are they calculated?

We all understand that a General Election is imminent but please have sufficient respect for your readers to question and fairly represent the facts are they are, and not as Government propaganda would lead us to believe.

Adrian Loveridge
Barbados