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SAINT Lucia and Arsenal have one goal between them with news that the Saint Lucia Tourism Authority (SLTA) have signed a new multi-year partnership with the new Premier League champions.
Under the agreement, SLTA becomes Arsenal’s official destination partner from the start of the 2026-27 season. The partnership covers both the men’s and women’s teams and is designed to boost Saint Lucia’s international profile, particularly in key tourism markets such as the United Kingdom.
Saint Lucia branding will feature prominently at Emirates Stadium during Premier League, Women’s Super League and domestic cup fixtures. The collaboration will also include joint marketing campaigns, fan engagement initiatives and international promotional activities.
In addition to tourism promotion, the partnership will support the development of an academy hub in Saint Lucia, extending the relationship beyond commercial objectives.
Louis Lewis, is the Chief Executive Officer for the Saint Lucia Tourism Authority. Lewis is a seasoned tourism executive with a distinguished career in destination marketing and strategic leadership. Appointed as CEO of the SLTA in October 2024, he brings a wealth of experience and a proven track record in advancing Caribbean tourism.
Lewis spoke to Voice Online about the ground-breaking deal.
RH: Share a little about this exciting alliance
LL: It’s part of a deeper, long-term strategy that we have had, and we have looked at because of the importance of tourism to Saint Lucia.
We have been constantly pursuing ways in which we can amplify the awareness of Saint Lucia in the international market space, and we’ve actually conceptualised utilising sports as a vehicle for gaining more attention, more public awareness.
So it started off with a sports strategy, which started in Saint Lucia, where we collaborated with a number of teams to really promote Saint Lucia and give visibility.
AMBITIOUS: Louis Lewis is the Chief Executive Officer for the Saint Lucia Tourism Authority
We have aligned with cricket clubs, with volleyball, and swimming clubs who were participating in regional tournaments, where we branded them with the Saint Lucia tourism logo and also a Q barcode so that wherever they went, they would be representing the destination and portraying imagery of the brand identity.
Then we had the good fortune of Julien Alfred becoming the sports tourism ambassador, winning the gold medal at nothing less than the Olympics, which gave us massive publicity globally.
Arsenal’s title success was never just about football
We embraced her as a tourism ambassador, a sports tourism ambassador. But the initiative went further. We started internationally, where we entered into an arrangement with the Toronto Raptors, where we could not afford to sponsor the team but what we did was partner with them to do a takeover of the half-time match that they were playing with the Detroit Pistons at the time, and that gave us tremendous awareness in the Canadian market, and we felt that the strategy was actually working.
Leading off of that, we’ve seen our visitor arrival numbers – because we overlaid a marketing plan on top of that – significantly increase at a time when Canadians are traveling less overseas. So it has actually worked for us.
We mirrored the partnership with the Toronto Maple Leaves, and that is another demographic of sports travellers, of sports enthusiasts and fans, and it gave us more visibility in the Canadian market.
We replicated that again in another significant market for us with the New York Yankees, where we have an ongoing partnership with them, where Saint Lucia is featured in the pre-game intervals and during the match itself; we appear on the perimeter boards, and we have activations whenever they have significant matches, and that just gives us a lot of visibility in the New York market.
The US is the largest market for us, accounting for over 50% of our arrivals.
Then came the opportunity for the Arsenal engagement with their deal with Rwanda coming to an end. That’s as much as I can give you in terms of the detail of the transaction, of the transition, but when the opportunity came, we jumped at it, and we were able to negotiate an agreement within the parameters of our resources, and hence the big announcement that you heard about a few weeks ago, where we have become the tourism and travel destination partner of Arsenal Football Club.
I can tell you that as the result of the partnership, just the announcement, we’ve seen tremendous interest in terms of searches on destination Saint Lucia, and that can only translate into positive outcomes, for visitor arrivals.
So that is the trail to where we have gotten. We started off at the local regional level, then we had the international exposure with Julien as the Olympic gold and silver medal winner, and then we took it onto different sporting disciplines, and now we are at this point.
The news becomes even more exciting with Arsenal winning the Premier League
It gives us the opportunity to amplify the visibility of Saint Lucia to a very wide audience, and it doesn’t just work for tourism. It works for exports, it works for investment promotion, it covers all the demographics. It is not just for the men’s team, it is also includes the women’s team as well.
It allows us to partner with their other partners as well, which is very important, so that there’s more branding – and on top of that, they are the champions!
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We have used football as a means of amplifying the visibility of Saint Lucia globally, and it’s now for us to overlay a marketing plan on top of that, to drive attention and drive visitations to Saint Lucia. That is our selfish interest to drive visitor arrivals to Saint Lucia.
It’s all about football development, creating livelihoods within the sporting fraternity for people who would be desirous of pursuing that as a career. So it is more than just the tourism visibility. It’s also has some capacity building for the sport itself in Saint Lucia.
What can we expect to see from August onwards in terms of the visibility of Saint Lucia at Emirates Stadium?
You’ll see us showcased on the perimeter board that advertises Saint Lucia as a destination and tourism partner for Arsenal. We also have a facility for hosting at the corporate level in a box area. That is a first for us.
It’s not just confined to football, it gives us a location in a prime spot within London, which is the financial capital. It’s opened up investment promotions, export promotions as well, and it gives us prominence in an area that we otherwise would not have had.
So we can expect to see Saint Lucia on display at the Emirates during the term of this agreement. More than that, you will see some activations and promotions of Saint Lucia on non-match days within the term of the agreement. Once we conceptualise what exactly and how we want to have that portrayed, you will see a lot of us.
I would anticipate that in time, Arsenal players and staff will make the journey to sunny Saint Lucia
Yes, that is part of the agreement as well.
I get the impression that you’re distinctly happy with this deal
Yes, and we have identified sport as an avenue for enhanced visibility, because whenever there is a prominent match taking place, you have viewers from a wide spectrum of audiences and demographics, and in that demographic potential travellers, and even within them, there may be travellers who may not have had Saint Lucia on their radar, but begin to see elements of their own interest that can be satisfied by a visit to us as a destination.
We are well known in the romance market. We will be well known, even better known, in the wellness market, and coming out of COVID-19, people are more concerned about their wealth, their health and well-being, and we have this tropical setting that has the assets of an exciting, a restorative, recuperative environment.
Fans from Africa and the Caribbean support Arsenal, hence they have been dubbed the Culture Club as everyone is welcome which is the same mantra of the SLTA
Very much so! There are two regions that we have targeted as our new source market that we are pursuing in this financial year, and one is the Latin American market. We are actively pursuing that, and one also is the African market.
What it does, is gives us visibility in those regions, but more particularly, the African market also has a diaspora in the UK, and that gives us direct access. There are direct daily flights from the UK to Saint Lucia, so anybody desirous of traveling to Saint Lucia, whether you’re from the African diaspora, the Indian diaspora, the UK, can come.