By Jasminee Sahoye

The Caribbean is still the preferred tourist destination for many Canadians as there are more Canadians per capita that visit the region than any other countries, with Ontarians being the largest group.

And there is more to celebrate, according to Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), the governing body for 33 destinations, the Caribbean has seen some 2.8 million visitors from Canada annually and a significant factor is that there have been repeated visits by Canadians.

Despite the global economic recession, 12 countries saw an increase in tourist arrivals and according to the CTO Secretary General, Hugh Riley, these countries have made significant efforts to attract visitors. According to figures as of December 1, 2011, released by the CTO, Cuba has attracted the largest number of visitors from Canada followed by the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.

A number of Caribbean tourist officials say the US is still their biggest market and that the downturn in the European countries would impact on visitor arrivals to the Caribbean.

The CTO secretary general said efforts are being made to get visitors to recommend others to the Caribbean adding that emphasis is being placed on getting visitors to share their experience through exit surveys.

“We make sure that we pay attention to the experience. From 2007 to 2010, there has been a very steady increase in visitors and one of the things that we trap very carefully at the CTO is how visitors enjoy the experience. We pay a great deal attention to exit surveys, we pay a huge amount of attention to understanding how we are doing and how we can do better.”

Earlier this year, the CTO introduced what is called the ‘total visitor satisfaction’ survey. The visitor satisfaction rating is the first of its kind and according to Riley “there is no other region in the world that has this total visitor satisfaction rating. And very simply, it is a measure of how we are doing in delivering the quality experience visitors that come to the Caribbean to expect. So it starts off by we’ve done the research going in to find out what the 10-12 criteria are that are sensible important to visitors to the Caribbean and then our destinations individually will be rating those criteria and guess what the rating is done by the visitors not by us.”

The TVS survey will be used as an index to measure whether visitors to the various destinations were satisfied with the experience.

Also, another focus by the CTO is to get visitors to recommend Caribbean destinations to others, not only to people of Caribbean heritage but other groups. A number of Diaspora meetings have been slated to attract members of the Diaspora to visit the Caribbean and successful meetings have been held in the US and Canada. A website called onecaribbeandiaspora.com has been developed to target the Diaspora with the theme ‘rediscover home’.