Special offers, are nice. They make you feel special!

This is Marketing 101 in the 21st Century, showing your appreciation to the clients who have given you their business in the past. By recording my contact information Cruise lines, Airlines, Resorts, Destinations all are now taking the time to personalize their service so that I will pick them AGAIN and AGAIN. I even got a Phone call last night from NCL, the agent asked if I had any questions about their Special Offers.  By the way I have not take a cruise in 10 years, here is where my name in their Database allows them to target me, with a special offer. Now that is working overtime to make sure that the next time I take a cruise I would pick NCL. My email inbox averages 20 a day from all the above groups except St. Maarten or any Airlines featuring St. Maarten with Resort special deals.

Here is where St. Maarten needs to make improvements ASAP. My questions are as follows:

• What are we doing to maintaining our 2 million plus visitors Market share, to keep our edge? 
• How are we marketing our products?
• Are we stepping into the 21st Century? Or are we still in the 20th Century?
• Are we using new Marketing techniques? Or are we still relying on the word of mouth that built our tourist industry over the years?  
• Is this new TSIS project going to do what we need to keep the numbers coming? 

We hope that someone is working on improving our Marketing programs, because our competition in the Region is working overtime to cut into our Market share. We may have this false sense of security, because the past two season have looked better than expected. But remember this, most travelers to Caribbean plan their vacations a year or two in advance. We are fortunate that we added 4 Mega Cruise ships, these ports of calls brought our cruise numbers to a record high, but our Hotels didn't do so well.    Even though our PJIA Airport had 800 Thousand arrivals we lost 30% or more to our neighbors in transfers, i.e. they went to others Islands in the region. That, in case you want to know is 240 Thousand, and we can assume that most if not all of the Air France arrival passengers went to the French side. Leaving us with 500 Thousand give or take. But how much of that number are our own residents traveling back and forth.

When I read the news I see a glimmer of hope on the horizon.  There is talk of a New Tourism Authority but no news on the plans on how they are planning to kick start the 2012 Marketing season. I guess this is a Get Smart (old TV comedy) method of "top secret" plans where agent 99 is always asking "Max what is the plan". He always came through in the end.  Well "Get Smart" gave us some good laughs back in the day with his Shoe phone and other gadgets to fight CIAOS (a spy-organization trying to destroy from within the Country.) I hope that our businesses and our Hospitality work force will be laughing all the way to the bank next season. Because  I've been seeing doors closing, permanently, all over Philipsburg which is not a sign of prosperity, but instead of CIAOS working overtime. New Malls in Cole-Bay with for rent signs in the windows..... So if our New Tourism Authority is going to bring in New business, and create methods to contacting our previous visitors to entice them to come back, I hope they start very soon.

If we've learned anything from the past seasons, then we can count on two things.
Number can be deceiving and Appearances of busy streets don't mean that money transactions are taking place. Since we are so good at counting how many Passengers landed at the Harbor maybe we should count how many returned to Cruise ships empty handed, and what percentage walked instead of using our chartered Buses and Taxi services. Simply put are we fooling ourselves?

The truth is that Numbers never lie (when you apply proper controls), ask your grocery store owners that use modern cash-register systems. What comes out of inventory should balance with what cash goes into the registers. They will be out of Business if they use the system that we are using currently in our Bread and butter Industry. You know the method "Whatever comes, comes, whatever goes, goes" This may have been OK in the 20th century, but in today's markets we need strategies to hold on to whatever  market share we have. Let me make it clear we need to Separate "FACT from Fiction." The days of ASSUMING that someone else on the Island is making money are over, if we the people are not benefiting from the numbers that are visiting the Island then we need to ask who is. So if no businesses are doing well then we need to ask who is fooling Who?

Once again I hope that we have plans in the works  to do things better, because if we don't we will continue to miss the boat.