For Dr. Jose Luis Perello Cabrera, an expert at the center for tourist studies of the havana university, the excessive standardization of the caribbean travel product is quite a worrisome trend

IN RECENT YEARS, the travel sector appears to have mapped out a different development strategy. Today's tourist activity is thought of in terms of building on compatibility with the environment and the social ambience, as well as under a view of quality, integration and environmental protection based on rocksolid competitiveness.

That model is wearing thin and many are surprised to see the 2.3 percent increase in overnight stays recorded last year. Tourism is crucial for the small Caribbean economies, just as much as bananas, coffee and sugarcane were in the past. Today, the region's single commodity is sun-and-sand tourism, yet the need to urgently reinvent the industry brooks no further delay, not does the adjustment of that model to the emerging demands and the new economic scenario.

In recent years, the UK economy has ratcheted up on a steady basis at a rate in the neighborhood of 3 percent annually. In the same breath, the country has featured low interest rates, a hefty pound as stacked up against the euro and the U.S. dollar, and a major real-estate boom that has generated significant profits for a number of sectors within the British population.

To top it all off, available income -the most important individual factor when it comes to traveling overseas- is one of the highest all across Europe. However, the UK travel market is engaged in a series of profound transformations that's moving way master than in other outbound markets. Those transformations are supposed to serve as the underpinnings for a new vision of the Caribbean offer, especially if the region is willing to keep up the growth rates scored by the UK.

In the course of the past five years, the arrivals of UK tourists to Latin America has shown an average growth of 21 percent, with much higher scores in the Dominican Republic (42 percent) and Cuba (a staggering 68 percent). Overall, increases in Central America have hovered over the double digits (9.2 percent). Another major regional destination is Jamaica, an island nation that reeled in 175,000 arrivals from the UK, perhaps driven by the large figure of Jamaican immigrants living in Great Britain.

The chairman of Aldesa Turismo acknowledged that hotel investments in the Caribbean "bring more advantages than drawbacks," yet he insisted that there's "certain wariness" among investors because tourist arrival rates in those countries "are not as bright as they should be."

One of the main issues here is excessive product standardization, a problem that's pushing down fares in the face of increasing competition and, therefore, leading to price slashes far beyond the feasible limits. It's important for the region to find out what its problems really are in an effort to prevent Caribbean tourism from enduring the same fate of bananas, coffee or sugarcane, a trio of crops that once set the cycling pace of the Grand Caribbean's feeble economies.