BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) – The Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) says the regional tourism sector recorded increased visitor arrivals last year with an estimated 14.3 per cent international visitors coming to the Caribbean, continuing the positive recovery trend of the sector.

Delivering the “Caribbean Tourism Performance Review 2023” on Friday, CTO Secretary General, Dona Regis-Prosper,  attributed the outcome to sustained demand for outbound travel from the United States, the Caribbean’s main source market and enhanced tourism-related infrastructure within the destinations.

She said the improvement was also due to the fulfilment of strategic marketing initiatives and augmented airlift capacity between the region and its source markets, albeit unevenly distributed among the destinations.

Regis-Prosper said the recovery of global tourism has been resilient, despite variability in the regional performances, with the Caribbean surpassing pre-pandemic arrivals by a modest 0.8 per cent, outperforming most of the main global regions in terms of recovery.

“Based on preliminary data provided so far by the destinations in the Caribbean, tourist visits were approximately 32.2 million, about four million more than in 2022,” said Regis-Prosper, noting that the data showed that each month’s arrivals exceeded those of 2022 thus establishing a continuous growth trend over the past 33 months as tourism steadily rebounded toward pre-pandemic levels.

The CTO said that arrival levels amongst Caribbean destinations either significantly recovered or moderately exceeded the benchmark numbers of 2019, with 11 destinations, Anguilla, Aruba, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, St Maarten, Turks & Caicos Islands, and US Virgin Islands performing better than in 2019.

The majority of those recovered greater than 50 per cent of their 2019 arrivals. In addition, multiple destinations registered new record levels for tourist arrivals in a single year.

The CTO said for the Caribbean, only the US market has fully recovered, while the recovery rates of arrivals from Europe and Canada reached 88.2 and 88.1 per cent, respectively. An estimated 16.3 million stay-over arrivals to the region came from the United States, representing an annual growth rate of 12.7 per cent.

The CTO said the performance here established a new record level of arrivals from this market and surpassed the pre-pandemic arrivals by 4.2 per cent.

“The performance of the Canadian market resulted in an estimated three million Canadian tourist visits by the end of the year, an increase of 46.1 per cent compared to 2022. Increased air service from major Canadian cities to Caribbean destinations played a pivotal role in driving up visitor numbers.”