About St Helena Tourism
Tourism on St Helena is still in its developing stage, and is currently exploring the best ways forward. St Helena Tourism is based in The Canister in Jamestown. While the functions of St Helena Tourism are more or less those of a fully fledged Tourism Board, in practice it is also involved with promotion, and servicing.
Since April 2012 St Helena Tourism has formed part of Enterprise St Helena, an umbrella organisation focussing on the economic development of St Helena as the island moves towards air access with the construction of an airport.
Tourism is a growth industry and is the major driver to help improve the economy and build a prosperous future for our island. This potential is highly recognised by the Department. We are passionate about St Helena and fanatic about improving the product and marketing it! We aim to deliver excellence, communicating our messages clear and loud. We work with partners to help deliver a seamless service. Putting the customer first, quality and sustainability will be at the heart of our organisation which should position St Helena as a premier destination.
St Helena Tourism is the island's tourism agency, representing, co-ordinating and assisting the industry in the development of high quality sustainable tourism product and enabling effective marketing of St Helena. It is operated by a small team who are dedicated to working towards these goals. One of the Island's key targets for tourism is to increase visitor numbers to about 30,000 by 2020 through air access and in terms of accommodating this future number of tourists, tourism infrastructure and services requires major development and improvement.
Another key target is to emphasise the need to protect and preserve our heritage; St Helena's heritage is recognised as our single most valuable asset with its conservation, preservation and enhancement being crucial.
Both the tourism policy and strategy represents the St Helena Government's strategic position for the orderly, sustainable growth of tourism. It presents a framework for future development aimed at achieving national goals of: reversing population decline, increasing prosperity and, eventually, financial self-sufficiency.
St Helena's economy is typical of small islands with high import dependency, limited labour market and high transport transaction costs, which all puts a burden on tourism growth. Tourism has not fully made the transition to the global market as it is heavily dependent on improved access to increase visitor numbers and to provide a more viable business environment for the tourism industry to thrive.
The Tourism Strategy 2012 - 2016 can be viewed here
The Sustainable Economic Development Plan can be viewed here
The Sustainable Development Plan can be viewed here
