The present report has been conceived to present innovation strategies, policies, cases, challenges and trends to be useful for a broad audience: national and subnational level tourism, innovation, industry and competitiveness authorities, and private tourism sector locally based. The main objective of this report is to support locally based public and private tourism players with guidelines and knowledge about technology-based innovation. Successful policies implemented in other parts of the world in order to foster innovation those territories and in the travel and tourism industries therein embodied will also be shown.
The report starts out placing the reader within the global trends and challenges the tourism economic sector is facing. It goes on by providing an insight about the current status of the Sector in the Caribbean region, by analyzing its singular development and underlining the need for approaching future tourism development with a high innovation scope in order to be and remain competitive in the global economy.
The present work addresses the Caribbean tourism strategies within the context of the dynamics of global value chains. The globalization of the tourism industry has framed the Caribbean tourism growth model in a way that most of the regions have attracted foreign investments in order to create a higher level of luxury. These investments have opened the access of the Caribbean region to global markets. However, at the same time, these large foreign players represent a constraint in the development of regional tour operators, as it is difficult for local (usually small companies) to compete with foreign (usually large companies). The advances in IT of the global industry have moved those international operators to the digital environment, putting together sophisticated platforms to perform better on the online markets.
The industry network in the Caribbean is rather complex. On the one hand, there are large foreign players, highly innovative and competitive, partially constraining the development of local economy. On the other hand, the local industrial network is made up of small and medium businesses who struggle to remain competitive and for whom innovation constitutes the usual barriers inherent to SMEs.
