Recently published visitor arrival figures show that Caribbean tourism has embarked on the long road to recovery. Following a disastrous 2020 when border governments closed to try to stop the spread of COVID-19 and months when the sector almost ceased operating, visitor numbers are now slowly increasing.
According to Tourism Analytics, the consultancy in Aruba that publishes tourism arrivals figures on a rolling basis, visitors to the Caribbean island excluding Haiti fell by 66.1% from 23m in 2019, to 7.8m last year. However, as of this year, its website indicates that a gradual turnaround is now underway. When the available stop figures for the first three months of this year are compared with January, February and March 2020, the pre-lockdown period when tourism was still booming, its statistics show that arriving visitors are slowly start to get better.