TRIP program is no more

Over two years since its creation, the Marianas Visitors Authority has officially disbanded its travel bubble program, officially called the Tourism Resumption Investment Plan, which was intended to restart the CNMI’s tourism program.

During MVA’s regular board meeting yesterday, all five remaining MVA board members unanimously agreed to the disbandment of the program.

MVA, however, still has an ad hoc committee that’s dedicated to tourism resumption.

According to acting MVA chair Gloria Cavanagh, the disbandment had to be done for two primary reasons: one is that the CNMI administration that created the program has already been replaced by a new administration, and two there is no more federal funding to back this program.

“The TRIP program was a committee that was created by the last administration in which to use [American Rescue Plan Act] funds to build back and invest in our tourism industry. Today, of course, we have a new administration, and ARPA funding, as we have heard, is no longer available for us to use. So we have to go back to using the funds we have on reserve and, as of now, all expenses have to be approved by the board and not by the TRIP committee,” she said.

Fortunately, Cavanagh said, the MVA has stowed away some money to continue to fund the tourism resumption investment but it will come at a cost.

“We’re very lucky to have saved quite a bit of money over the years but it comes at an expense and that expense is going to be destination enhancement. Although it’s [for] destination enhancement, if we look around the islands, it’s obvious we still need it. So we’re going to have a finance committee meeting to try to [determine] how much we actually need to do as much as possible with the limited funds that we have,” she said.

The acting board chair stated that to date, MVA has about $6.2 million in reserve, with about $4 million initially reserved for destination enhancement.

However, the MVA still has obligations to the tourism resumption program that totals about $12 million.

“We saved about $6.2 million. So of that $6.2 million that we have saved, $2 million was for a building fund and over $4 million was for destination enhancement. Now, that would go to our commitments to the TRIP program that we no longer have additional funds for. Our commitments now is roughly around $12 million,” she said.

Fortunately, before the end of the last fiscal year, the previous administration remitted about $7.2 million of ARPA funds to MVA, which will now go toward fulfilling MVA’s obligations to tourism resumption.

“We do have about $7.2 million available under ARPA that was remitted to us prior to the end of the last fiscal year. The additional funds will come from the reserve funding. The disbandment will not affect the already established TRIP program. We do have leftover funding that we haven’t yet spent and so it’s just a reduction of the amount of promotions we can do,” Cavanagh said.