BVI JOINS CAMPAIGN SEEKING DELAY IN NEW U.S PASSPORT RULES

The British Virgin Islands Tourist Board BVITB has started to put systems in place to ensure that the territory, as a premier vacation destination, is not impacted negatively by the new United States passport regulation.

The U.S. government has announced that effective January 1, 2006, U.S. citizens visiting the Caribbean will be required to be in possession of a valid US passport to re-enter the United States. 

An economic impact study, conducted by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) on behalf of the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA), considered the market share of visitors from the United States to the Caribbean and the percentage of those visitors that do not use a valid U.S. passport. The study examined these figures against total visitor export earnings in the region, which total US$20.7 billion and concluded that in the Caribbean, as much as US$2.6 billion of visitor export earnings and more than 188,000 travel and tourism jobs could be at risk. 

According to the study, the BVI gets 64.3% of its visitors from the U.S. market and 50% of them do not use passports. The study therefore concluded that the territory stands to lose $102m or 32.2% in visitor exports and 1, 863 travel and tourism jobs as a result of this new passport regulation.

 However, while the 64.3 % representing the percentage of US visitors to the Territory corresponds with BVI Government’s Development Planning Unit (DPU) figures, the DPU reports that for the years 2003 and 2004 approximately 92.4% of US citizens entering the Territory entered with passports while about 5.7% entered with birth certificates or voter registration cards and about 1.9% with other documents. 

Director of Tourism Kedrick Malone said the territory welcomes hundreds of new visitors each year and as such, would definitely be impacted by this new regulation. He said: “The market has become very much a last minute market and last minute travelers seldom have passport credentials.”

He said the Tourist Board has started to advertise, put notices on its website at www.bvitourism.com, produced a flyer to be displayed at trade shows and release information in the Welcome Magazine.

Mr. Malone is also supporting a call by the CHA for the U.S. to give the region’s tourism industry more time to prepare for this change.

“CHA can appreciate U.S. concern for its security, but cannot lose sight of the impact of the new regulations on Caribbean travel and tourism, which will be a permanent realignment of traffic, with spontaneous, last minute travel significantly reduced,” said CHA President Berthia Parle.  “Our position advocates an extension of time for the Caribbean to the same introductory date as Mexico and Canada, January 1, 2008, to allow the region’s tourism to prepare better.”

This is one of the items discussed by industry officials at the Hyatt Regency in Miami, Florida, June 26-29 for CHIC 2005, the Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference.