Grenada Puts The Focus on Sustainability

From monitoring leatherback sea turtles during hatchling season to organizing beach clean ups, the Grenada Tourism Authority has launched a new voluntourism program across the tri-island destination of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique.

“We believe that people who visit want to get close to the community but also in terms of the travel trend people really want to give back,” Petra Roach, the CEO of the Grenada Tourism Authority told PressToday. “We put together 19 programs, initiatives that people can get involved with, on island, things that were already in existence, but under the same umbrella. It’s a very wide cross section of things that people can do in terms of giving back. They can do beach cleanups, they can plant coral, they can plant trees in a mangrove.”

Fresh off a meeting with Air Canada Vacations, Roach shared that Air Canada will resume twice weekly service from Toronto on Oct. 30.

“That’s really welcome news,” she said. “The Canadian business represents 8% of our overall traffic. And what was really good for us was the fact that in spite of not having a direct service, we still had 4% of the business coming from Canada.”

Overall, recovery is underway with Grenada back to 80% of 2019 levels, with arrivals from the UK and the US already back to pre pandemic levels.

“We know that the demand is still there having talked to the tour operators here,” she said. “We just came from Air Canada Vacations and they’re saying that business is up over 2019 in terms of forward bookings. And when we looked at groups, groups were actually up by 37% year over year to date in 2019.”

Pictured at Baxter Media’s office yesterday are Petra Roach, CEO of the Grenada Tourism Authority, and Sekou Stroude, Director of Sales, Canada.