SUMMER TOURIST ARRIVALS should see Barbados regaining the three per cent it lost in the first quarter of the year.

Minister of Tourism Noel Lynch, in an interview
with the SUNDAY SUN yesterday, said it was expected that business in the island's main foreign exchange earner would improve.

"Our first quarter was
a little bit down, we were about three per cent off and we will be able to claw back and come back in April and May when we were substantially up, and June is looking good. By the end of June we expect to have taken back that three per cent we lost," he said.

Lynch explained that the Caribbean Community (Caricom), especially Trinidad and Tobago, when combined, was the island's third-largest market after the United States and the United Kingdom. He said the Caribbean performed better than Canada where much ground was lost.

The merger of Caribbean Star and LIAT and the withdrawal of Caribbean Airlines services from major gateways to Barbados have impacted negatively on the performance.

"It meant that the connecting point between Barbados and Trinidad, we lost that and that's why we were down. We lost a lot of the capacity that we had and the cheap fares that we had with Caribbean Star and LIAT in that price war," he said.

However, Lynch said the tourism planners knew price was an issue and were "working assiduously" to ensure that it does not stop people from coming
for Crop-Over.

"The Fort Lauderdale route we just announced on Air Jamaica is going
to considerably claw back a lot of that traffic we got from the United States.

"We worked with Air Jamaica to come up
with a price point that Barbadians and Caribbean people can really embrace. Barring any unforeseen circumstance such as oil going up again, you should see prices falling between the next four to six weeks and particularly for
Crop-Over," said Lynch.

He said packaging for the festival was going to be innovative.

He said the local tourism partners met with LIAT on Friday and a drop in prices was expected. Chairman of the National Cultural Foundation, Al Gilkes recently warned that unless the airfares dropped, this year's festival could be adversely affected by arrivals from the Caribbean.

wendyburke@
nationnews.com