No more cheap talk about improving tourism, please.
Action is needed!

 An open letter to the Ministry of Tourism/Tourism Authority from Mandoo, member of tWRF.

Bathway has been trashed with left-behind from long weekends, Teachers cook off and way back as Easter totally spoiling the Bathway and surrounding area. I am bringing this to your attention. It seems to me you draw a dividing line as to where you are responsible for.

A majority of visitors and locals spend their time there picnicking, swimming and trying to enjoy the area. But their ‘experience’ is being totally ruined by the old garbage, which should never have been left there in the first place. I am therefore asking you, or some relevant authority, to adopt the area from River Sallee to Levera Beach and ensure that something is done to clean it up. The Tourism Authority cleans Grand Anse and Morne Rouge beaches. When will someone take on this other all-important area in the north of the island?

All the time we hear how vital our visitors are to us, but when we look deeper into what we actually deliver, these examples show that we are merely paying ‘lip service’ to the problems. As an island-wide tour operator, I see these neglected situations on a daily basis. And they degrade and devalue what should be high quality experiences for our visitors. They are a self-made and self-perpetuated insult to us as Grenadians and our beautiful island. They show – in reality – just how little we actually care about our visitors and our own people.

The time has come for us to do something about it!  Are we going to start the new season just like we finished the last, with these awful and disgraceful sites around our island? The evidence of pictures is there to show the disfigurement.

Members of parliament regularly take sea baths at bathway and seem to walk over the trash. Are they confortable with it? Do they just see it as natural and as welcoming as the sand?

The pure Grenada website shows a lovely view overlooking levera. Pure? Is joke you making.

As the principal authority in the tourism industry, the Ministry of Tourism is ultimately responsible for our visitor sites and attractions. And yet, over the years, it has consistently and systematically failed miserably to deliver the support and service expected of it by those of us who are dependent on Grenada’s tourism industry and who earn our livings from it.Your role is to be in the forefront of anti-litter legislation, and we ask you to lobby vigorously for the enactment of the new draft law, so that littering can become a thing of the past and we –and –you can expend our energies elsewhere.

If the Ministry (or its ‘agencies’) cannot step up to the plate and do the job, the time has come to hand over these sites and scenic attractions to individuals who understand their fundamental importance to our tourism business and who know what quality visitor facilities are all about and how to maintain them.

Grenada relies on tourism as the country’s leading foreign exchange earner, contributing some 25% of GDP, we cannot allow for more hollow words and empty promises of action. Things have to change.

I am fed up with the continuous cheap talk about improving our tourism product. Action is already overdue.