Both Government and tour operators are aware of some hassling of tourists on the streets and beaches in Grand Cayman – an audience at a tourism graduation ceremony heard last Thursday.

Taxi driver, Danny Connolly, called on his fellow graduates at the Westin Casuarina Resort on 26 October to “get in line” if they wanted to be ‘hospitality ambassadors’ of the Cayman Islands.

Mr Connolly was engaging  in discussion moments after he addressed the public transportation sector graduates of the Ambassador of Hospitality course.

The veteran taxi driver was concerned that some of his taxi drivers, tour operators and dispatchers were offering a substandard service to their guests.

“When we travel we don’t have people running up in our face with signs and frightening us,” he said.

“For the last 30 years people have been approaching these tourists like we’re a third-world island and we’re offering a first class destination at a first class price.”

According to the operator, the Island is still offering a third class service although it is not a third world country.

“We need to stop the hustling of people on the roads. We either get in line or get out of the line,” he said.

In responding, Mr Clifford said that is going to change, as his ministry is aware of shortcomings on the part of local operators and vendors.

“When you hear our stay-over visitors talking about why they like to come to Cayman, one of the reasons is that they don’t get hassled on the beach by vendors,” he said.

“I understand that in some areas it has started but we’re going to stop it before it gets out of hand.”

Mr Clifford also addressed uniforms and other concerns that some of the over 200 graduates expressed briefly last Friday.

“It’s part of the product, it’s part of the experience and we can’t have it. We have to be better organised and more professional than that.”

Mr Clifford noted that Cayman needed to protect its product identity to prevent its guests from going to another destination.

“If we don’t have anything better to offer in this destination, then it’s probably something else in the next destination that we don’t have that will give them the edge over us,” he said.

“Therefore, we will lose the business to them so we have to be very careful. We really need to be paying attention to what is going on around the world and particularly in this region.”

The minister said the time had come to do things right in the local tourism sector.

“We have to do what is right because change will be necessary - change has started. There will be some people who will accept that and there will be some people who will resist change and that’s understandable and that’s human,” he said.

Mr Clifford urged the operators to take a step back and have an “objective view” of the situation.

He added that the changes were for “the greater good” of the Islands, which were aiming for a sustainable tourism industry.

“We can’t simply sit down and do things the same way we were doing them for the last 100 years, making the same mistakes and expecting different results,” he said.