In the days after Hurricane Maria in 2017, the Foundation For Puerto Rico in San Juan became a command center for 180 global organizations responding to the crisis because it was one of the few offices on the island that had Wi-Fi access. Nine months later, the crisis really isn't over, as Skift heard in detail as we visited the foundation's offices Monday during our annual company retreat. The foundation, though, is looking ahead and on July 1 it will help facilitate the merger of the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. and Meet Puerto Rico to create a new destination marketing organization that will look at the island's tourism issues holistically instead of the previous focus, which was overly tilted toward branding alone.
The idea is to seize the opportunity to create a new era for Puerto Rico tourism and its decimated visitor economy. The foundation has three pilot projects around the island to bolster tourism beyond San Juan, and intends to have 50 such initiatives in the next couple of years. Brad Dean, the head of the new destination marketing organization for Puerto Rico, said the goal is to propel Puerto Rico tourism beyond its Caribbean peers and to create a globally competitive tourism brand. That's a tall order, but we witnessed a ton of passion about the mission, which foundation executives described as a tourism takeover rather than a recovery story. Reemerging from a natural disaster is not a unique issue, of course. The whole world will be watching to see how well Puerto Rico fares in writing its next chapter.
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