Minister for Tourism Charles Clifford has expressed disappointment by the context in which the Caymanian Compass has placed the latest tourism statistics for air arrivals for January 2007.
The front page article, titled Air Arrivals Still Sluggish, appeared in Tuesday 27 February’s edition of the newspaper.
Mr. Clifford was also disappointed in the editorial on the same subject.
The article noted that January 2007 was up on the previous year, but was down on January 2002, which followed the 9/11 attacks, and also down on other Januarys such as 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2004.
Mr. Clifford said this context paints a negative picture of the destination and works counter to the national marketing, advertising and promotions campaign.
‘We have accepted, and indeed I have said publicly that we are yet to achieve our pre-Ivan arrival numbers, but, notwithstanding that, we have made very significant progress as demonstrated by the latest statistics,’ Minister Clifford said.
‘The statistics at the end of 2006, which are not disputed, show an overall increase in air arrivals of 59.3 per cent for a total of 267,257 stay-over visitors. In the US market alone the increase for 2006 was 82.9 per cent with the Northeast region of the US posting the largest increase of 94.6 per cent.
‘Additionally, the Canadian and European markets posted increases of 42.3 per cent and 31.5 per cent respectively. As you have seen from the statistics for January 2007, this trend is continuing.’
The Minister added that the universal understanding is that any country which suffers a natural disaster such as experienced here from Hurricane Ivan, does take several years to fully recover from, and for consumer confidence in the destination to return.
‘So clearly there has been significant recovery, progress and achievements and that is positive news which I believe should have been included in the story.’
Mr. Clifford said that as we move closer and closer to full recovery in 2007 he fully expects the increases in stay-over arrivals to level off.
‘It is also clear that the product today is better than it was pre-Ivan and indeed more emphasis is being placed on our tourism product now than ever before. We expect to receive a good return on that investment and all indications are that our predictions are correct.’
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