Weekly Report - 19 February 2015 (WR-15-07)

CARIBBEAN| Tourism sector sets new record. On 10 February the Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) released its annual sector report which found that a record 26.3m tourists visited the Caribbean sub-region in 2014, up 5.3% on 2013. Last year saw the fifth consecutive rise in the number of visitors to the Caribbean to reach new record levels, underlining the sector’s dynamism. In fact, the number of visitors last year surpassed even the CTO’s own projections of a 2%-3% increase. The CTO highlighted that the increase in visitors to the Caribbean was higher than the average global increase in tourism in 2014 which, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), increased by an average of 4.7%. The CTO report also pointed out that the amount of money spent by visitors to the Caribbean last year also reached a new record of US$29.2bn, up 3.9% on the US$28bn spent in 2013.  Hailing the results, CTO Chairman Richard Sealy, who also doubles as Barbados’s tourism minister, said that “there was strong demand throughout 2014 and I am particularly pleased with our performance during the summer period when our growth rate was almost twice that of the summer of 2013”. Sealy added that “this is also an indication that leisure travel to the Caribbean is still in demand; and it is a sign that despite moderate [global economic] growth, stability is returning to the markets and consumer confidence is growing”.

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