T he extreme uncertainty surrounding the tourism recovery in the Caribbean highlights the importance of boosting innovation and supporting transformations that align tourism destinations and products with post-pandemic global demand trends, says the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

“Over the longer term, Caribbean countries must spur innovation and reinvigorate their tourism offerings,” said Olga Gómez, tourism lead specialist at the IDB.

“It is no longer enough to depend on the lure of splendid beaches. Tourism destinations need to invest in improving their competitiveness, aligning their tourism products to the broader local and global economic trends, and exploring new and traditional emerging market segments such as global nomadism or nature-based tourism,” she continued.

IDB’s latest report ‘Imagining a Post-COVID Tourism Recovery: Regional Overview’ analyses key drivers of tourism demand in the short term, including the evolution of the novel coronavirus pandemic and the vaccination roll-out, the economic environment of source countries, the split between business versus leisure tourism, and airline capacity, among others.

Given travellers’ revealed preferences and the fact that most current tourism activity relies on the region’s attractive natural assets, environmental sustainability and climate change adaptation will be more critical than ever. These issues must therefore be prioritised in the public and private sector policy and investment agendas, the study says.

Even for the less-tourism-intensive economies of Guyana and Suriname, where the tourism sector economic contribution is relatively small compared to the regional and worldwide averages, there is room for improving the sector’s contribution to growth and employment in the coming years.

The report also updated the IDB’s Tourism Dependency Index, which calculates the relative dependence of over 160 countries globally on tourism for economic output, employment, and exports. Of the world’s 15 most tourism dependent economies, eight are in the Caribbean, led by Aruba (ranked first in the world, with a score of 80 out of a possible 100 on the index), with The Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica joining the list of most tourism-dependent economies.

Based on a database developed from various national sources, a breakdown is also now available for tourism arrivals to the three most tourism-dependent economies. Overall, 2020 represented a contraction of international arrivals of 76 per cent for The Bahamas, 67 per cent for Barbados and 69 per cent for Jamaica. This is in line with the estimate by the UN World Tourism Organisation of a 67 per cent contraction for the broader Caribbean region.

“On the positive side, firms have been adjusting business processes, and governments have been advancing in digitalisation in response to the pandemic,” the report noted. “This form of innovation could lead to productivity increases that are sustained into the post-pandemic period”.