Tourism
What's Ahead for SPTO?
Financial Challenges Loom Large for South Pacific's Leading Tourism Agency
The financially struggling South Pacific Tourism Organization hopes to recruit six more countries to its list of national tourism office (NTO) members. The tourism ministers of Australia, New Zealand, the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and Nauru will be invited to a meeting of the SPTO’s Council of Tourism Ministers scheduled for June 14 at Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands.
Backing from the Australian and New Zealand tourism ministers could lead to a strong working relationship between SPTO and the Australian and New Zealand national tourism promotion organizations.
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These to date have preferred to concentrate on solo national promotional work rather that adopting a line the SPTO would like to see adopted — the selling of the South Pacific as a multi-destination package, with visitors seeing some island countries and Australia and New Zealand.
Chief Executive Lisiate ‘Akolo says that the six extra country members would add considerable weight to SPTO’s quest for funds to replaced nearly 20 years of financial backing from the European Union that, for budgetary support, dried up after May last year.
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While the EU says it is willing to finance projects, but not recurrent spending, ‘Akolo says it appears that it will be at least 18 months before the Europeans begin dispensing any money at all to any recipient under an aid pact with African, Caribbean and Pacific Island countries it renewed, with important modification, in 2000. This has left the SPTO in a bad financial bind. It has to slash its staff at its Suva headquarters to 10 and cut back on a wide range of activities. A few projects are still carrying on with unspent funds carried over from previous EU aid. Two projects are proceeding with funds supplied by a new donor, the government of Taiwan.
‘Akolo says there has been so far “little progress” with efforts to win money from other governments. “It’s quite difficult in the sense that there is no money around.” There had been hints that SPTO’s Suva headquarters location would make it difficult to find fresh sources of money until political difficulties in Fiji were solved, he says.
“We are operating under uncertainty. We have been seeking for some training programs, especially for Melanesian countries,” ‘Akolo says.
