The BCIC Rally Barbados is making big bucks for the country both on the domestic market and the tourism sector after injecting around $4 million last year.
Speaking at a media briefing last Thursday at Bushy Park race track, St Philip, both Event Director Neil Barnard and sports manager of the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI), Kamal Springer, highlighted last year’s financial impact.
Barbados’ premium motor sports event has on its entry list 51 overseas crews from 13 countries, which is the highest in a decade since the event recorded 44 in 2015.
In addition, there is a total of 75 local crews who have signed up to compete this year.
“We purposely target Clubman competitors, because they tend to bring a lot of people with them, and this year that’s certainly the case. We know that we have 13 teams coming from Ireland this year, and one team has almost 40 supporters coming with them,” Barnard said.
“We’ve actually heard over the last week or so, ‘oh yeah, we have so-and-so coming with us’ and then I’m hearing about a Catamaran cruise on Tuesday, and two boats are being booked out, and they’re trying to find other Catamaran boats to join.”
Social events
Springer said that events like the annual stages rally impact the potential earnings of the country through visitor arrivals.
“When we looked at it last year, we were around $4 million. We’re anticipating a minimum of that or more this year. We’re anticipating over 600 people, and some of them are staying for two weeks. Some of them are staying in villas, staying in hotels, people are spending on social events, as Neil mentioned, spending on vehicles, driving cars, gasoline and even the drivers having to maintain the vehicles all that.”
“We’re looking at even domestically, people are going to go get their food and beverage to come out and watch, 7 500 people per day who are going to spend. So the economic impact of this event is kind of unique, in that you have the international spend, but then that domestic spend is quite up there as well.
“So, overall, we anticipate that there should be a higher level of spending just like last year, and then there’s a high net worth demographic where some of these drivers that pay tons and tons of money to bring their cars here. So, some of them are going to buy property and some are interested in long-term villas and that kind of thing and we want to stay at a high level.”
(SW)
