At a crossroad

While fully booked Vladivostok Air charter flights are proving to be a boon to the local tourism industry, uncertainty looms whether the segment will remain a viable market once Public Law 110-29 takes effect in June this year.

Marianas Visitors Authority marketing manager Bruce A. Bateman said it will be a disaster if visa waivers are not extended to Russian tourists once the federal government takes over local immigration.

“If that’s true, that will cause serious economic damage to the CNMI. We rely more and more heavily on the Russian tourist market, which grows ever larger all the time. While their numbers grow, it seems as if we’ve been getting higher and higher quality tourists from Russia…they stay longer… and they are far more free spending. It’s just a higher end market that come here from eastern Russia and even from the central part of the former Soviet Union.”

Bateman said he couldn’t start to fathom the impact the loss of Russian tourists will have on the Commonwealth’s visitor industry.

“All of the hard work our travel partners—the hotels here, their agents in Russia—the past 10 years will all go down the drain. Same is true with China, the largest travel market in the world.”

Kanae Quinn, Pacific Islands Club sales and marketing director, said if Russian tourists are required to obtain a U.S. visa after June 2009, the whole process of bringing them into the CNMI will become more time-consuming and costly than the current VEP system.

“Basically, anything that impedes Russian visitors to travel to the CNMI will directly impact the number of travelers to the island. PIC has witnessed the growth of the Russian market since 1996 and the anticipated abrupt decline in June will certainly affect the resort in terms of room nights and revenue,” she said.

Hyatt Regency Saipan marketing communications assistant/GSO sales Le Shen seconded Quinn’s assessment and said the loss of the Russian tourists will effectively cut off from the CNMI a very promising segment of the travel market.

“For our hotel, Russian business has increased a lot compared with 2006, 2007, which covered some lost business from the Japan and Korea market due to economic crisis. I can only say we will lose big revenue from this market, not only for Hyatt, [but] for the whole island as well. But we all have to wait and see…”

But PIC and the rest of the tourism players on the island are not letting it happen without a fight.

Quinn said that, as a member of the Hotel Association of the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marianas Visitors Authority, PIC has aligned with these two organizations to promote the U.S. visa waiver for the Russian tourists.

“Since tourism is the only sustainable industry, we, as an island, need to persuade the federal government to carefully consider the consequences of not allowing the Russians or Chinese tourists to continue to travel to the CNMI.”

Charles Reyes, Gov. Benigno R. Fitial’s press secretary, said all is not lost and his boss is trying to persuade the federal government to extend visa waivers not only to Russian tourists wishing to come to the CNMI but Chinese tourists as well.

“The governor is working with our new delegate and our local business community to address this matter with federal policy makers in Washington, D.C. The governor is in Washington, D.C. right now working to raise awareness of the importance of the Russian and Chinese tourism markets for the CNMI. The governor respects the federal government’s concern for national security but we must find a way to protect U.S. national security without severely compromising the CNMI’s economic security, particularly in this distressed economic environment.”

But if no visa waivers are granted, Quinn said the CNMI will just have to face reality and survive with what remaining market it has.

“The alternative is to seek other markets in the region that are included in the U.S. visa waiver program in addition to working with our Russian agents whose clientele already have U.S. visas,” she said.

Fiscal year to date numbers show that the Russian tourism market is up 86 percent from the same period year ago—449 in October 2007-November 2008 to 836 in the same period in fiscal year 2009. Just last month, 456 visitors from the former Soviet Union arrived in the CNMI, compared to 261 in November 2007.