At this point it feels like we are somewhere between American and Surinamese as we have spent so much time learning from people, eating the food, and traveling around (at least the northern part of the country). As an update for today, we made it through another few interviews with tour operators, hotels, and a business association; spent time at STS gathering hard data from their MIST system and learning about quite a few policies that have been proposed for tourism that didn't quite go anywhere; and even made it to the US Embassy to interview the US Ambassador to Suriname.
While I head out in another few hours, Hiro and Debbie have 3 more interviews tomorrow morning followed by a trip to Brownsberg. It will be good to at least see a bit of the interior, which is definitely one of Suriname's key tourism products. At this point we have gathered quite a bit of data and have a number of findings to combine as we head into phase 2. The three of us had a chance to visit both last night and tonight regarding our thoughts. What we will do from here is each gather our findings and next steps into individual documents over the next few days so that we capture the major points before getting too ingrained back in the US. We can then use the documents to help move us into building out the value chain as well as start the next phase of the project with competitive analysis. We will not interview everyone that we planned, but we can send follow-up emails and surveys to the relevant people as we continue to gather data.
In the mean time on our break, one priority is working with STS to prepare the tourist survey for January so that we can gather direct consumer information as they are willing to help facilitate the survey and it will be beneficial to all of us. Beyond that, let's plan to stay in touch over email during the break with any findings and additional research that we are each working on and then meet as a team during the first week to review everything we found to date.
John Kinney
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