THE BUCK STOPS HERE: Canadians prefer agents for Caribbean bookings

Canadian travel agents are helping the Caribbean reach record levels of tourism this year – boosted by a whopping 132% increase in bookings by travellers using retail travel agents – far ahead of the international norm.

At the same time, OTA bookings decreased by nearly half (46%), compared to a 4% increase internationally for agent bookings and a 16% decline in OTAs.

The welcome trend (based on bookings through April 20 compared to the same period in 2019) was revealed by analytics firm ForwardKeys at the recent Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association’s 42nd annual Caribbean Travel Marketplace in Barbados.

ForwardKeys VP Olivier Ponti told the audience, “We’ve seen during COVID that people tended to book more and more direct with the airline. But that’s not true for all markets. When we zoom in on Canada, which opened a bit later, retail travel agents did extremely well in generating business for the Caribbean.”

Ponti identified Sandals, Royal Caribbean, and Club Med as being among the companies that benefitted from having strong relationships with retail agents in Canada that directly led to bookings.

To that end, Ponti urged Caribbean suppliers to identify agencies bringing business to their destination and “see how you can work with them in a smarter way.”

“It’s using data to make smart decision,” he added.

Other data included bookings by corporate counsellors down 21% in Canada (compared to 14% internationally) and, corresponding to the rise in agent bookings, a decline in direct air bookings from Canada by 40% (vs. +7% internationally).

Overall, Canadian travel to the Caribbean is down 13%, but showed a 5% Easter Week uptick over 2019.

Ponti told Travel Industry Today that Canada’s marginal decline in visitations to the Caribbean is attributable to this country’s later return to travel (than the US and other countries) and lagging recovery of full air capacity.

Despite that, more than two million Canadians travelled to the Caribbean in 2022 and Ponti added that flight searches from Canada are also on the rise.

As for why Canadians are using travel counsellors in greater numbers, Uniglobe president Dean Dacko recently observed to Travel Industry Today that travel troubles during the pandemic prominently illustrated the value of using agents (again).

Consumers could see on a daily basis during the pandemic “all the things we were doing,” he said, thereby creating “a new respect and appreciation for why they choose to work with professional travel service providers.”

He explained, “It’s easy to go a website book an airline ticket – anyone can do it. But the true value of what we provide are all the things that come in association with that when events or changes or situations happen that cause things to need to be revised, changed, or altered. And what COVID did is really re-enforced that understanding from our clients’ perspective.”