Thursday, March 28, 2024

Travel tax bid

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by TONY BEST
 
WHEN A CARIBBEAN DELEGATION goes to London this week, Barbados, which relies on the British market for its tourism “bread and butter”, will be eager to hear about Britain’s precise plans for the airline passenger travel tax.
The new Cameroon government recently let it be known that it intended to remove the dreaded duty on passengers and impose a per-plane tax, and Richard Sealy, Barbados’ Minister of Tourism, is hoping that the Caribbean Tourism Organisation’s (CTO) team who will be meeting with senior British officials, including two ministers, would help bring some clarity to the unsettling tax situation which has contributed to a significant fall-off in British visitors to Barbados and its neighbours.
Travel to Barbados from Britain during the first five months of the year has fallen mainly because of Britain’s troubled economic picture and the impact of the tax, and Sealy said that the upcoming CTO initiative was part of the regional body’s continuing effort to encourage Britain to change its fiscal policy on travel.
“CTO has been a constant voice, whether it was working with the West Indian community in the UK or at the level of the heads [of CARICOM governments] to get them to raise [the tax] when they met with then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and even now organising opportunities for the new government to hear our perspective,” Sealy told the SUNDAY SUN.
“CTO is doing what it can. Resources, of course, are limited and there are issues of subscriptions and a few members being in arrears; not Barbados.”
But John Maginley, chairman of the CTO’s Council of Ministers, was quite explicit about the delegation’s key objective when he told the SUNDAY SUN “our goal is to get them to remove it altogether”.
But he was quick to add that with the tax expected to bring £2 billion into the treasury in London, it was unlikely that the region would succeed in getting it eliminated. But the various destinations would welcome a significant reduction that would “restore equity” in the way it is being applied to passengers travelling to the Caribbean and other countries.
“We think it is an unjust tax in the first place,” said Maginley, Antigua’s Minister of Tourism. “It started out as a carbon emission tax but that was soon discounted and then [the British government[ said it was just a tax. So they have had many changes to it.
“We are hoping that they would look at it, realise that it is going to cost them more in the long term. They are making it more difficult for Caribbean countries to exist in this tourism industry. More countries are going to come to them for aid. We are hoping the new government made it clear that they are going to remove the tax and we are hoping they would remove the per-plane tax as well.
“The problem is that the new government has taken off the passenger tax and it has defined what the per-plane tax is going to be,” he said. “We don’t know what the situation is. They haven’t given that details and we are going to London to have discussions with the new minister of tourism and the minister of trade for tourism affairs and we hope that some of those questions would be answered.”
Commenting on the decline in tourists from Britain, Sealy said the CTO would be going all- out to reverse the downward trend. However, he said, the significant upsurge in travel from North America to Barbados has eased some of the pain caused by the drop in arrivals from Britain.

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