Compete Caribbean Community Tourism Development

Small Planet Consulting has been applying the Market Ready approach to the Compete Caribbean Community Tourism Development Initiative for over five years. This joint project of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), UK Aid, the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and the Government of Canada. There are 13 National Tourism Organisations (NTOs) and dozens of community-based tourism enterprises participating and benefiting from the initiative. The countries involved are Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago. This project continues until 2022

In the first phase of the initiative, between 2015 and 2017, SPC's work included:

• Assess eight market segments with relevance to the Treasure Beach tourism product, prioritize the segments in which the cluster can be resilient and identify competitiveness issues for the cluster within these segments. Based on the Market Ready approach, develop an action plan for the cluster and a logical framework of priority activities and timelines. SPC's market-ready tourism model, an experience- and consumer-oriented approach, was applied.
• As a follow-up to the Treasure Beach market segment assessment project and marketing plan, as part of the Tourism Café team, SPC conducted a destination visitor experience assessment, conducted experiential travel product development and marketing workshops, identified and advised 10 companies to develop 10 themed experiential travel products, developed comprehensive tour development plans for those new products, conducted product testing with tour operators and public sector stakeholders for three of the new tours, and provided recommendations and action steps for development and marketing.

In the second phase of Compete Caribbean, between December 2018 and January 2021, SPC acted as the lead community tourism specialist and undertook three projects for Compete Caribbean under the "Innovation for Tourism Expansion and Diversification" initiative, which aims to build the capacity of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) to diversify product offerings and enable more Caribbean entrepreneurs to generate tourism revenue through community tourism development. This component supports local communities to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to understand how to monetize their assets in a sustainable manner. The Market Ready approach was applied in all three projects:

• From 2020 to 2021, SPC provided technical, review and oversight support to five cluster facilitators responsible for the development of seven community-based tourism cluster development plans in five countries: Belize (Garifuna communities), Dominica (Kalinago territory), Jamaica, St. Lucia and the Bahamas.
• From 2018 to 2020, the Market Ready approach was applied as the basis for developing a tourism inventory tool, a community tourism profile tool, a diagnostic tool to measure community tourism readiness, and a business development manual to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses.
• In 2019, SPC trained National Tourism Organisations and community tourism clusters on CBT development. This included the formal launch of the Caribbean Sustainable Tourism Conference in St. Vincent in August 2019. At the same time, Judy led a 2-day CBT Tourism Masterclass to teach national tourism officials from across the region how to use the toolkit.