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Haiti: Martelly administration working to position country as the next hot tourism destination in the Caribbean
Tourism Minister Stephanie Villedrouin says Haiti has to stand on its own feet. “If we want to be a sovereign country, if we don’t want to depend on other countries, we need to figure out ourselves how to move forward and how to get revenue, and tourism must be no.1 on the list.”
Each hotel room built creates two jobs and four indirect jobs, she said. Officials say the tourism push will create more than 1,600 direct jobs and 6,500 indirect jobs. Tourism generated US$200 million last year, Villedrouin said. The country’s entire budget is US$3 billion.
Haiti was once a tourist destination – a haunt of the rich and famous who came in search of late-night Voodoo ceremonies and rum-fueled revelry. But years of political instability and natural disasters continued to keep them away.
Officials say the 2010 earthquake killed 316,000 people, and a U.N. fueled cholera outbreak nine months later took more than 7,750 lives.
Today, the only mass tourism, approximately 600,000 a year, according to Villedrouin, comes from cruise ships stopping at Labadie on the north coast where passengers can frolic for a few hours in a fenced-in resort.
Villedrouin couldn’t say how many other tourists came on longer stays last year. Air Transat, a Canadian charter carrier, flies weekly between Montreal and Port-au-Prince, and says it has brought in 120 tourists this year on holiday packages in Haiti costing US$1,399 to US$1,600.
Source: Associated Press
