Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1483470
B M & T ••• November/December 2022 ••• www.blackmeetingsandtourism.com 12 lines, cruise ships, hotels and other tourism industry partners to promote USVI as a premier destination. Boschulte spends a large portion of his time outside the office, making trips to the United States, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe to drum up tourism business for the islands. For Caribbean tourism marketing, which often entails persuading people to travel thousands of miles to visit the islands, those promotion- al trips are essential, he says. "The job entails a tremendous amount of travel," Boschulte says, speaking during a fall tour that included a stop in Las Vegas. "We have to go out and aggressive- ly market." From 2012 to 2017, Boschulte was President and CEO of The West Indian Company, the St. Thomas-based cruise ship port and retail center that is one of the largest in the Caribbean. Over the next year, he had a management consulting business called Halcyon Partners LLC that catered to clients in the tourism, hos- pitality, utility and real estate industries. Boschulte stepped into his role as Commissioner when the USVI was still coming back from two Category 5 hurri- canes in 2017 and would soon face the impact of Covid-19 on the local tourism and meetings industry. Under his guid- ance, the tourism department initiated a pandemic recovery strategy that included weaning the islands away from their heavy dependence on the cruise business, which previously accounted for about 70% of the USVI's tourism market. "We recognized that what had been the driver in the past was not going to be any longer," Boschulte says. "We went 18 months without one cruise ship." Boschulte's team made up for that loss by being proactive from the very start of the pandemic. Soon after the USVI closed BY SONYA STINSON COMMISSIONER OF THE USVI D E PA R T M E N T OF TO U R I S M A CONVERSATION WITH J O S E P H B O S C H U L T E J oseph Boschulte became Commissioner for the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Tourism in 2019, following a long succession of leadership posts in business, government and higher education. Along with developing the department's marketing and public relations program, Boschulte works with air- "WE RECOGNIZED THAT WHAT HAD BEEN THE DRIVER IN THE PAST WAS NOT GOING TO BE ANY LONGER,"