Travel Agent was on site Tuesday morning for a media breakfast hosted by the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), which announced the return of the CTO Conference in Antigua and Barbuda this October. The exact dates, as well as the host hotel for the conference, have yet to be finalized, says Johnson JohnRose, the CTO’s communications officer. This will be the 31st CTO Conference and the first in two years after it took a back seat to the inaugural Annual Caribbean Tourism Summit (ACTS) in Washington, D.C. last year.
“Last year, we just felt it didn’t make sense to have CTO Conference since ACTS followed a very similar format,” JohnRose says, noting that the CTO Conference will return this year because ACTS will follow a different format this year.
Instead of public events and conferences, this year’s ACTS, which takes place June 8-10, will mostly involve closed-session meetings. Perhaps ACTS’ biggest meeting this year will be a special “Think Tank” session held on June 8. According to a written release, the Think Tank session is “designed to be a strategic brainstorm session” and is a “part of the overall goal of ACTS to provide innovative and creative approaches to the current challenges facing tourism.”
The session will be moderated by Adam Sacks, principal of Tourism Economics, a top industry consulting company that provides in-depth analysis of the tourism industry. Expected participants in the session include ministers of tourism, representatives of the hotel and airline industries, U.S. publishing partners and financial services members, tourism industry partners and senior representatives of the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association (CHTA). The results of that session will be reported back to the media at Caribbean Week in New York, which runs from June 8-12.
Visit www.onecaribbean.org.