Saint Lucia’s Dive Fest wrapped up last weekend with big fanfare. In its third year, the festival devoted to everything diving featured a major highlight and a first for Saint Lucia – an underwater wedding, in collaboration with the Saint Lucia Tourism Authority and local diving group Eastern Caribbean Diving. Local media were all over the event, making the new bride and groom Julie and Sean somewhat celebrities during their stay at the Royalton Resort, Saint Lucia.

TravelPulse Canada was on hand to witness the ceremony and spoke with tourism officials to learn the importance of Dive Fest to the country’s tourism growth.

“Dominica and Grenada are really well known in the Caribbean for Dive Festivals and Saint Lucia was always known for romance, for honeymoons,” said Ernie George, Sales Manager, USA for Saint Lucia Tourism Authority. “We realized that even people on honeymoons, people who are just engaged may want to dive. We have a destination that is very diverse. Why not open it up and use our strengths to increase visitation?”

It makes sense considering the time of the year is typically slower for the tourism industry in the country. Diving in Saint Lucia is unique due to its tropical weather and rain patterns where parts of the landscape such as shrubs and branches wash into the water during a storm. This creates pockets where fish can lay eggs and thrive, creating habitats for marine life and opportunity for divers to see fish communities that are unique to the island.

Though a small island of only 170,000 residents, Saint Lucia is on track to open an additional 2,000 rooms in 2020, bringing the total tally to 6,500. As reported during an interview with Minister of Tourism, the Hon. Dominic Fedee in August, the country is investing heavily in infrastructure across the island which includes renovations to the main airport and roads.

George says in the past they had focused heavily on getting the Dive Fest message to consumers via tour operators, whereas in 2019 they added media and travel agents to the mix.

“In past years we tried a lot of different components of how best to reach people to come to Dive Fest. What we realized was in this market, the best mix is one of agents, operators and media. We decided for 2019 to add media and agents to our FAM to really get the message across.”

The week ended with a cocktail party at boutique hotel Bay Gardens Marina Haven, located in Rodney Bay. The group was joined new CEO Beverly Nicholson-Doty and the Hon. Dominic Fedee, Minister of Tourism for Saint Lucia who told the group he was thankful for the tourist board and sponsors’ commitment to making the week such a success.

Not a swimmer himself, Fedee suggested with a laugh that since topping this year’s highlight of an underwater wedding will be very difficult, he is willing to make a splash in 2020 by kicking off his diving career at Dive Fest.

We think everyone might just hold him to that.