Venezuelans in Curacao (The 70's)

With the oil boom in Venezuela and the sky-rocketing international price of petroleum in the early 1970s, wealthy Venezuelans also began to flock to the island to purchase expensive clothing, home furnishings and other consumer goods from Europe and the United States that were not available in their country or were prohibitively expensive due to protectionist import policies. Venezuela's 1974 abolition of a century-old duty on imports from Curaçao increased the island's attractiveness. These Venezuelans were also content with more modest lodging arrangements, preferring to spend their money on high quality purchases.

As the island's tourism sector began to cater more and more to shoppers, and as the number of US visitors fell further due to the economic recession in the United States in the mid 1970s, the new upscale hotels faced lower occupancy rates and deteriorated; several went bankrupt. When their contracts expired in the 1970s the major hotel chains left Curaçao, frustrated by the low occupancy rate and ongoing problems with labor unions, which, in the aftermath of the 1969 uprising, were enjoying unprecedented power. To ensure high employment rates, a key social concern in the post 1969 period, the government decided to take over management of the hotels, creating the Curaçao Holding Company in 1976 for this purpose. For the time being, the private sector was out of the hotel business. The new properties were now run primarily as job providers for the local population, rather than as competitive businesses that served a demanding international clientele.