Dominican Republic leads recovery of tourism in the Caribbean

The Caribbean was the best performing region in the world, reporting 15 million stopover arrivals in 2021

The Dominican Republic is the Caribbean country with the best performance in the recovery of tourism, managing to recover 91.2% of its 2019 traffic in the first two months of 2022.

This was indicated by the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA) in an article where it shows the percentage of recovery of tourist flows in different Caribbean destinations, which according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), in January 2022 the region strongly led the recovery of stopover arrivals.

It maintains that, according to the UNWTO, the latest statistics show that the total number of international tourist arrivals with a stopover in January 2022 was 32.9% of the total reached in January 2019.

However, aggregated figures for Caribbean destinations reporting their layover arrivals figures to date in 2022 show that the region achieved 61.5% of the regional total for the same months in 2019, the highest recovery rate from any region of the world.

Second highest was Southern Europe/Mediterranean with a 59.5% recovery compared to its 2019 figures. While the worst performing region remains Asia/Pacific with just 7% of its 2019 visitors recovered in January 2022, largely due to the loss of outgoing traffic from China.

The best performing destination in the Caribbean at the beginning of 2022 continued to be the Dominican Republic, which recovered 91.2% of its 2019 traffic in the first two months of 2022, followed by Curaçao, Puerto Rico, Aruba and Saint Lucia. The worst performing destination remains Cuba, which only recovered 19.6% of its 2019 arrivals in the first two months of 2022.

This performance continues the positive trend seen in 2021 when the global tourism sector recorded 421 million international arrivals with stopovers, just 28.7% of the 1,468 million arrivals recorded in 2019.

The Caribbean was the best performing region in the world, reporting 15 million stopover arrivals in 2021, 57% of the 26.3 million it received in 2019.