The choice
MVA recently reminded House members that Korea is the only tourism market showing signs of life. Korea is about 50% of the market. The two other markets, China and Japan, have yet to recover even as the CNMI government continues to spend as if happy days are here again for the local tourism industry.
As MVA’s acting board chair has said, increasing flights from Korea is not easy. “It’s plane utilization on their part, for our…partners in Korea. And right now, adding additional flights does not mean the demand is there when they can yield a lot more going to other destinations like Southeast Asia as well as to Japan.”
As for Japan, “we say, okay, we’re going to increase the Japan arrivals. That’s not easy either. You know, a lot of people forget that we’ve been off the shelf in Japan since…2018 and that we’re dealing with a different generation altogether. As MVA, we are looking at actually trying to redo our positioning in Japan to reach out to that new generation by hiring different types of advertisers and marketing companies that will be able to approach…that generation.”
Promoting the CNMI, by the way, costs money.
“They say, okay, let’s go to Australia. We are going to Australia next month with Brand USA. But that doesn’t mean that is going to happen…just overnight. You know, we’re not going to see the return of investments right away from the new markets. We are also joining CPA at the Routes Asia in Malaysia…to try to entice one of the 148 airlines that will be participating there to look at the CNMI as a viable market.” (Routes Asia is the “only route development event dedicated to Asia Pacific”; it will gather “the region’s airlines, airports, tourism authorities and aviation stakeholders….”)
According to MVA’s acting board chair, “There is hope out there. There are a lot of markets that we haven’t touched and a lot of markets that we can grow. But do we have time for that? We look outside, we feel it. It’s desperation….” She commended Rep. Edwin Propst and other House members for introducing a House resolution expressing support for the CNMI Economic Vitality & Security Travel Authorization Program, or EVS-TAP, and encouraging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “to work with the CNMI government and its leaders to facilitate the responsible promotion of the Chinese tourism market.”
EVS-TAP “is everything that we asked for and everything that the administration should support,” MVA’s acting board chair said. “[It’s the] additional vetting that we need…in order to have a safety net when it comes to visitors…from [China]. We need this as an economy in order to strengthen our economy, because it’s 39% of our total tourism economy.”
Or the CNMI can make do with the Korean market and the trickle that is the Japan market. In that case, the CNMI government should stop pestering taxpayers to cough up more, and start reducing its annual budget instead.
Learn we must
AT a recent House PUTC meeting regarding net metering, the governor’s special assistant for climate policy and planning said:
“We can learn from the experiences of other communities such as the U.S. Virgin Islands which also went through a similar process and ended up overhauling their net metering policy after having a series of open workshops and conversations with all of the different stakeholders…and they came up with a new customized structure that worked for their community. And we can do the same; we need to do the same.”
Now according to a Dec. 15, 2023 news story of the St. Thomas Source, a U.S. Virgin Islands daily internet newspaper, the territory’s Public Services Commission met in December to discuss, among many other things, “a motion…to save the net metering program.” The commissioners talked about “the bottleneck in the net metering program…, which started in 2020. Since then, some residents have been trying to sell energy produced on their rooftops back to [the Water and Power Authority or] WAPA but have not succeeded.” WAPA, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ CUC, needs a new metering system to replace its current one, which is a failure, a commissioner said. As for WAPA’s financial situation: “Government agencies are not paying their bills, and WAPA is not paying its vendors.”
Incidentally, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ population in 2021 was 105,870 compared to the CNMI’s 49,481, a number that has likely decreased since then. The USVI’s GDP in 2019, pre-Covid, was $4.1 billion while the CNMI’s was $1.18 billion. In 2019, prior to Covid, over 2 million tourists visited the USVI. The CNMI? Over 480,000. In 2023, MVA said there were over 200,000 arrivals.
Perhaps we can “learn” better if the CNMI has an economy that will allow its government to afford net metering, which has been in the statute book since 2006.
