Ironic? Or, instructive?

It's ironic that newborn Minister of Tourism (Shucks! After nine months in the womb of Cabinet, what else could he be?) would choose a forum on disaster preparedness to spin the tale that Trinidad and Tobago's horrendous crime situation has not dampened the attractiveness of these shores as a preferred tourist destination. Then, again, it may very well be instructive that so he did?

For, apart from the rebuttals mentioned by the Trinidad Newsday of August 8, 2008, one also must wonder whether the Minister, misguidedly, maybe mischievously, misdefined "tourist" to include persons who come here for business purposes and or intransit to other destinations? The question is posed, because yours truly has always been under the impression that "tourists" are those foreigners who touch down or come ashore to soak up the sun, sand, sea or to "grind on ah bamsee".

In other words, unlike business folk, who are required to travel in the normal course of their business activities, real tourists make a deliberate decision to visit Trinbago, after comparing alternative leisure destinations.

In any event, real tourists bring net income, direct from their wallets, while the cast-your-bread-upon-the-

waters business traveller does not. Which explains the difficulty one has in finding a foreigner who came a knocking to close a business deal that was more favourable to T&T that to his/her foreign-based principal.

Thus, statistics related to the movements of the true tourist would more indicative of the impact the Ross-identified factors had on tourism. Yours truly suspects that the Minister has lied to us, suspicions which are partly fuelled by wary observation of the company he keeps and by the tardiness of the relevant T&T tourism sector monitoring agency in furnishing the Caribbean Tourist Organization with any further statistics after February 2008's calamitous drop in total tourist arrivals (-26.1%) , a collapse triggered by a very steep decline in arrivals from Europe (-43.5%).

Instructive, then, it is!