Recently published visitor arrival figures indicate that Caribbean tourism has started down the long road to recovery. Following a disastrous 2020 during which governments closed borders to try to halt the spread of COVID-19 and months when the sector all but ceased operations, visitor numbers are now slowly increasing.
According to Tourism Analytics, the Aruba-based consultancy which publishes tourism arrivals figures on a rolling basis, stopover visitors to the island Caribbean excluding Haiti declined by 66.1% from 23m in 2019, to 7.8m last year. When it comes to this year, however, its website indicates that a gradual turnaround is now underway. When available stopover figures for the first three months of this year are compared to January, February and March of 2020, the pre-lockdown period when tourism was still booming, its statistics indicate that visitor arrivals are slowly beginning to recover.
