Curazao, julio 2016.

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.

Curacao - Tourism promotion XIX Century

In the nineteenth century several hotels occasionally published pamphlets for their guests. One of the oldest surviving ones is the 1890 Bulletin of the Hotel del Comercio, directed at Spanish-speaking travelers and published by hotel owner Abraham Salas. The island's oldest known tourism guide, Almanaque Guía de Curazao ("Almanaque Guide to Curaçao"), was issued in 1875 by the printer José R. Henriquez, and was also aimed at visiting South Americans. The first known promotional material in English about Curaçao dates from 1898 and was written by a US travel writer, William Benedict Reilly, whose musings about Curaçao (including the quote at the beginning of this chapter), made up the entire June issue of a popular US magazine of the time, The Monthly Illustrator. The first guide for cruise visitors was published in 1901 by Edwards, Henriquez & Co. on the occasion of the maiden voyage of the Princess Victoria Louise. A local tourism guide was written in 1907 by Diocleciano Ramos y Garcia, a correspondent for several foreign reviews and a journalists with the local newspaper El Imparcial. Among the early attractions that were recommended by these turn-of-the-century publications were the Hato Caves, Curaçao liqueur, Willemstad's picturesque buildings and the old Jewish cemetery.

In 1932 the Chamber of Commerce began publishing an annual tourist brochure. In 1936 a new advertising folder was published in English for cruise visitors; with an edition of 35,000 it was distributed among travel agents, shipping agents and cruise lines. In 1937 the Chamber of Commerce commissioned a Dutch author to write a book about the island, specifically aimed at the Dutch market; two years later, the Chamber published a tourism folder that was distributed at the New York World's Fair.

In 1950s and 60s new hotels took on their own promotional efforts, hiring local and international public relations and advertising firms. The official tourism organizations that were founded over the past few decades all developed their own publicity materials in the second half of the century. In 1960 Rudy Dovale, a American who operated a local advertising agency, began publishing Curaçao Holiday, an English-language pamphlet with updated tourism information; several years later he launched a full color Spanish language magazine geared to South American visitors.