Dragonfly Media Curacao

Last Thursday KPMG released their inaugural Caribbean Hotel and Condominium Benchmarking Survey.

The key findings of the survey are:

• 2007 financial performance for hotels was slightly down and condominiums was slightly higher compared to 2006. The year 2008 will bring additional challenges, due to reduced airlift, the global economic crisis and rising energy costs.
• though slowing, the development pipeline remains active;
• significant room capacity is being added in the non-English speaking Caribbean;
• 2008 year to date tourist arrivals has increased in certain major markets when compared with 2007 figures.

You can download the survey report at the KPMG website.

The Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) three-day Caribbean Small Hotels Retreat on Barbados started yesterday. During this retreat owners and marketers of small hotels throughout the Caribbean will talk about subjects relevant to their business.

Yesterday, Billy Jonckheer (long-time marketer from Curacao) spoke about how hotels with a small budget for marketing should spend their dollars. His two most important points were that they should spend more money on their websites (and marketing those) and that they should make sure that they target their niche market. You can read the full article on nationnews.com

Tourism is booming on Curacao and the hotel chains know it. This morning the Curacao Tourist Board and CHATA (Curacao Hospitality And Tourism Association) presented the new Room Inventory Forecast to CHATA’s members.

This forecast shows the projects that are currently under construction or under development. It shows that from now until 2010 a total of almost 3,000 extra rooms will be available for tourists. You can see all the numbers at CTB’s corporate website. This is a good time to do business on Curacao!

One of the industries that has changed the most due to the power of the internet is the travel industry. In the ‘good old days’ when you wanted to travel somewhere you would go to a travel agent, load up on brochures and book your vacation with a travel agent. Your opinion of a destination was based on those brochures and the recommendations of travel agents and your friends’ stories. If nobody in your circle of friends had ever been to Thailand and your travel agent didn’t actively tout it, chances were that you would never go there. Some adventurous souls would grab a Lonely Planet and chase Phileas Fogg around the world, but the majority of people just spent their holidays on the well-beaten path.

The internet has changed all that. Roughly 80% of travelers research and book their holidays online and this is expected to become 90% before this decade ends. If you are in the hospitality business you need to be where your guests will find you and the internet (read: Web 2.0) is a different ballgame than the travel agents. In the days of the travel agents and the brochures potential guests could only listen to what you said, but now you need to listen to them and join the conversation or suffer the consequences.  (more…)