Adrian Loveridge: No need for Barbados to be the world’s most expensive tourism destination

Lots of beaches, sand, surf, sky everywhere. Why should people pay most for Barbados? Maybe they should… but why?

“We have to either redress this reality or perception or risk losing more market share.”

Adrian Loveridge – tourism expert, hotel owner

With Sterling reaching an eight year high against the Euro, making most European countries dramatically less expensive as holiday destinations and the Canadian Dollar below 80 cents when compared with its southern neighbour, the pressure is on to making Barbados perceived as offering value-for money.

So when a Spanish based bank with a huge presence in the United Kingdom recently published the results of a survey entitled ‘Barbados Caribbean island is most expensive place to visit’ it should send a huge tidal wave of realism to our various tourism policymakers and planners that we have to either redress this reality or perception or risk losing more market share.

Santander UK currently serves more than 14 million active customers from 921 branches and 66 regional Corporate Business Centres in the United Kingdom. As of 31^st December 2014 it was the most switched-to-bank attracting 1 in 4 new retail accounts.

The survey, largely undertaken by Opinium Research/ONS Travel Trends 2014, stated ‘British people visiting Barbados will feel a particular nasty sting in their wallets this summer, having to fork out an average of GBPounds 109 a day in spending money – not including the cost of a hotel’.

Around the world Barbados was placed as No. 1 in a list of the ten most expensive countries for British people to visit based on average daily spend. Second was the United Arab Emirates.

Just as alarming, is that Santander concluded that the daily costs of visiting Barbados have risen from GBPounds 79 per day or nearly 38 per cent since 2010.

Currency trader illegally made US$300 million for UBS Swiss Bank – He goes to jail, the big-shots keep their jobs and bonuses!!

“But so far, no senior executives have been prosecuted in a scandal that helped shred public faith in an industry and has cost some of the world’s biggest banks and brokerages $9 billion in fines and seen 21 people charged…”

Oh my children; gather round and Daddy will tell you a story of how the world really works…

In 2006 Tom Hayes was an intelligent nice young man of 25 years old who loved the numbers of finance; so much so that UBS Swiss Bank hired him to be a yen derivatives trader for their Tokyo office.

And Tom did an excellent job for UBS – earning the Swiss bank over US$300 million dollars in three years and 45,000 trades. YIKES!

Excellent job except for one thing… Tom was conspiring with other people to rig the markets, and he sent out thousands of emails to do it.

Did his bosses know? Ha! Does cheese go well on toast?

Now Tom and a few other low level people will probably be going to jail.

But the bosses? Everything be so fine, just fine. UBS and Citigroup paid fines, but none of those bosses will go to jail or lose their jobs.

Children… this is the way the world is.

Same same in Barbados. Everywhere.

Say… do we have branches of UBS or Citigroup in Barbados? Really? Well…

Insight – How Libor whiz Rain Man became ‘the guy everyone was going to blame’

He was so obsessed with the numbers that he did not see his downfall coming.

The first trader convicted by a jury in the global Libor rate-rigging scandal was a maths whiz nicknamed “Rain Man”, who slept as an adult under a superhero duvet cover he had owned since he was eight.