By Malaika Laurent
Caribbean Net News Dominica Correspondent
Email: malaika@caribbeannetnews.com

ROSEAU, Dominica: Dominica’s Tourism Minister Yvor Nassief does not believe that more money should be invested into marketing the island because the destination is not ready for increased capacity.

However, hotel entrepreneur Atherton Martin on Wednesday suggested that there is a need to fuel more revenue into the sector.

“One of the issues the Hotel Association has been for years trying to raise, is if you have 100 million-dollar industry, it doesn’t make sense to be allocating and spending 2.5 million dollars a year on marketing that product which is what has been for the last 8-10 years."

“The industry spending is 30 percent so if you're generating 100 million dollars in revenue, you should be spending 30 million dollars annually to market that product, which will still leave you with a tremendous rate of return on that investment for marketing. For years we have encouraged and advocated, it has not yet happened,” Martin pointed out.

But Nassief believes that the money budgeted for marketing first needs to be spent properly before more can be considered.

He added that the numbers of hotel rooms available that are up to the required standard are not enough for increased numbers of tourists.

“We’ve got to focus on the rooms which have acceptable standards and we don’t have enough of.

“If you don’t have enough rooms and your occupancies are growing, do you spend more money on marketing; is that an answer?” Nassief noted.