As the Virgin Islands prepares for a tourism season expected to bring a record number of visitors, a long-promised policy and plan to help guide the sector have been delayed yet again.
When the government hosted its first Tourism Summit in January at Peter Island Resort, Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley said a policy set for completion in June would inform the creation of a plan set for completion around this month.
But now neither document is done, and during a Friday press conference Mr. Wheatley pushed the target date for the plan to “sometime in 2026.”
He added that a request for proposals for the plan will be issued soon, suggesting that the document will be created by a private-sector company.
He also said he is currently reviewing a draft policy, but the draft has not been published, and he did not say when it will be finalised.
The latest hiccups follow a string of earlier delays stretching back more than a decade.
In 2011, the National Democratic Party came to power promising to replace an outdated tourism strategy adopted in the mid-1990s.
Until his retirement in 2019, then-Premier Dr. Orlando Smith continued to push the idea, which was also included in the Recovery to Development Plan that government published shortly after Hurricane Irma devastated the territory in 2017.
“The first step to revisioning and repositioning the tourism industry for the future is the development of a national tourism strategy in 2018,” the plan stated. After that, however, multiple efforts to create the strategy stalled.
Mr. Wheatley’s government restarted the work, and he told the House of Assembly in January 2024 that the plan would be delivered by the end of that year.
That didn’t happen, but public discussions got under way this year during the January summit on Peter Island.
Then the government hosted eight more public meetings across the territory from March 4 through April 17, according to schedules published online.
But on April 23, the government cancelled six other meetings scheduled for April and May, including one in Road Town.
“The public meetings were only attracting a few people,” the premier told the Beacon at the time.
The cancelled meetings were to be replaced by “target focus groups,” according to government.
But officials have yet to announce any details about these sessions, and government Communications Director Karia Christopher did not immediately respond to requests for comment about them.
