The Tribune

Top Ministry of Tourism executives met with their global sales and marketing workforce to discuss travel industry trends and “the disruptions” impacting the sectors.

Joy Jibrilu, the Ministry’s director-general, and Ellison “Tommy” Thompson, deputy director-general, joined Bridgette King, executive director of global sales, for the three-day gathering designed to prepare staff for the future.

Attendees included persons from many of The Bahamas’ top visitor markets including New York, Atlanta, Florida, Houston, Toronto, Europe and Latin America, as well as the departments of sports, groups, weddings and honeymoons and communications.

Mrs Jibrilu said: “The tourism industry must be driven by initiative, innovation, and creativity.” She added that the Ministry’s role is to “inspire vacationers to come to The Bahamas”, and added that the meeting “was also an incredible opportunity to expose our young sales leaders to cutting edge trends in the travel space”.

Mrs King said: “The sessions were intended to invoke discussions around the future of travel and the disruptions that are reshaping the travel industry. At a time when new technologies are emerging constantly, and decoding travellers’ booking behaviour has gotten so much harder to predict, our young leaders must be prepared for a future that is dynamic and volatile.

“So we brought in some of the best in various travel categories like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Travel Zoo, Trip Tuner and Association of Travel Advisors (ASTA) to share their expertise on the future of travel, the big data question, consumer booking funnels and the evolving travel industry.”

Other senior tourism executives who led the training sessions were Ian Ferguson, executive director of administration/operations; Mia Lange, executive director of global communications; and Andre Miller, digital director.

The meeting closed with highly competitive team presentations on how to solve a number of critical challenges facing The Bahamas. Mr Thompson described the gathering as “a huge success and a model for future meetings”.