During the current lockdown it’s perhaps an ideal opportunity to reflect on the positives and negatives of an everyday small business and hope that these experiences can benefit us all in the recovery days to come. While not directly tourism related, any reasonable person has to ponder what on earth was on the minds of the management of one or
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Delivering consistently good customer service, across the board, has for a long time has been one of the greatest and contentious challenges on Barbados. And even if locals have been conditioned to accepting the many failings, our visitors are starting to rebel, contending whether increasingly high prices, are indeed offering actual value-for-money or justifying the prices charged. While running a
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I visited the Bahamas to examine the damage from Hurricane Dorian. When I returned, I received a message from Flow to pay my phone bill. They said that I owed $383. Using Internet Banking, I paid $400 – then Flow blocked me from making calls from my cell phone. After three days of inconvenience, I called Flow. They said that
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Submitted by Hotelier Adrian Loveridge ———- Original Message ———- From: andrew oneill <xxxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com> To: “xxxxxxxsxs@caribsurf.com” Date: December 23, 2019 at 8:57 AM Subject: Liat problem My Loveridge, dear sir I am a huge fan of your column. I recently had a problem with Liat and am not sure what to do. My mother in law in visiting for Ukraine she
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By now, it should be evident to everyone, that the long-line, long-wait, high-tax method of managing Barbados has not changed. There is one notable exception. As a semi-frequent traveller, I would rate my recent GAIA arrival experiences as the best of all countries to which I have ever travelled. On my most recent flight, I was out of the
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Returning recently to Barbados on a British Airways flight, landing early from a near freezing Gatwick Airport, it was a real treat to clear entry formalities using the automated passport kiosks in seconds. Then being finally processed by a warm welcoming female Immigration officer. With only cabin baggage, passing through the red channel was just as trouble free, with time
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I recently examined category 5 hurricane damage in the worst affected Bahamian islands. As usual, it was the simple things that caused unnecessary building failures. I plan to publish our findings, for the benefit of home-owners, in a subsequent article. To visit the Bahamian islands and return home, I had to go through airport security eight times. After the collapse
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Have we reached a crossroads or what the more sceptical may refer to as an almost insurmountable hurdle in our tourism development? Returning on a near capacity Virgin Atlantic B747-400 from Gatwick last week, I was initially surprised that just before landing a member of the flight crew advised over the PA to try and get off the aircraft as
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Submitted by Ironside Last weekend’s electronic theft of thousands of dollars from the accounts of several commercial bank customers and the subsequent response of the banking cartel (a.k.a Banking Association) to the crisis should leave no doubt in anybody’s mind that said banks do not have our welfare at heart. In pure Bajan terms, they don’t give a phart about
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Our tourism planners have a major task ahead of them unless significant changes in terms of availability, connectivity and reduced cost for air travel within the Caribbean takes place. On a recent return flight from Barbados to St, Maarten the price of my ticket was US$740 to attend the Caribavia conference. Making up this astronomical fare were the following non
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The following note was received by the blogmaster today from a BU family member around 10AM. It is self explanatory. The thought which comes to mind – we have our priorities wrong. The BWA built a headquarters for how many million? Yet we are unable to respond to the most basic customer request i.e. fix a leak! Hi David My
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I really hate opening any column with a negative, but after tourism leading the way for so many years, one is left to wonder why we cannot even seem to get the simple things right? Returning into Grantley Adams International Airport from London recently off a British Airways flight that was not quite full, at around the same time a
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The following is an exchange between Chris Halsall, telecoms expert and a FLOW representative regarding the importance of FLOW doi gn a better job to filter phishing emails passing through their servers to avoid security incidences for end users – David Barbados Underground Hello Rochelle. Thank you for your response. And, yes, I know this was a “phishing” attempt. This
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I frequently wonder if those who guide our tourism industry really understand the basics which make it work, at all. Arriving on schedule at 9.45 pm the American Airlines flight last Monday, we dutifully filed off the plane and took our place in the queue for immigration. The flight was close to full, so on a B737 Max 8, this
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From my very early days in the tourism industry I have never really thought that there was anything overly complicated about the sector which necessitated even remote levels of rocket science. But there are just some people in key decision making roles, who simply do not understand what it takes to function properly. Having just spent a couple of weeks
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Late last year I experienced probably the worst ever hotel stay that I have personally endured in almost five decades of being involved in the tourism industry. As I had fully pre-paid the hotel through a well known third party booking agency which does not identify the actual hotel until payment has been made, I arrived at the property with
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It would seemingly appear that one of our major telecommunications companies, only relatively recently exposed to real competition and after decades of a virtual monopoly, has finally woken-up to the reality that most successful businesses are service driven and orientated. Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we live in the hope that this is
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Some Canadian friends recently took us out to lunch and while I have eaten at this particular restaurant before, it was frankly so good in every aspect, I felt duty-bound to post a review on Tripadvisor (TA). Within less than a week TA had advised that my comments had received 458 views worldwide. It reinforces that social media has transformed
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