Paying the accommodation costs for those tourists and returning nationals who waited for longer than 72 hours for the COVID-19 test results will cost this island around one million dollars.
However, according to Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, this would be money well spent on helping to repair the Barbados brand in the island’s international tourism source markets.
Seeking to justify Government’s decision to give such assistance to tourists and returning nationals due to backlash from locals, she insisted: “How do we believe that we know that we have done something that falls short and that we should just turn our faces and backs away and do not offer some form of satisfaction?”
Expressing her belief that the majority of Barbadians were not against the decision to foot the bill, she reminded persons that many of these visitors would not have budgeted for long hotel stays and in some cases, several had run out of money due to the delays in receiving test results.
Mottley also suggested that the move would put less of a strain on hoteliers.
“The thought of hoteliers having to have a crisis of conscience as to whether they go to the police or whether they write off or accept the fact that they would not get paid for a night or those nights is something that would not work well, especially if you have to turn around and pay the workers and to pay everyone else,” she added.
Regarding the proposal to purchase return tickets for tourists who spent their entire stay in quarantine due to the tests backlog, she expressed similar sentiments of the need to give these persons who would have spent their money to come and enjoy the island, satisfaction.
“Apart from anything else, if we were going to have to resolve this issue, ask yourself what it would cost the Government of Barbados to buy electronic advertising on CNN, BBC, ABC, CBS, NBC. Ask yourself what it would cost us to buy half-page or whole page ads from the New York Times, to the Washington Post, to the London Times, Toronto Sun. Ask yourself, why is it the Toronto Sun ran a story this week that the Government of Barbados turned a positive into a negative or a negative into a positive however which way you want to view it,” she said.
The head of the country further stated that while the island could not control some things like a natural disaster, it was necessary to control how we treat others and not to wait for a lawsuit “to do the right thing”. (JMB)