The final figure of 321,650 air arrivals for 2012 was the strongest in 11 years. The previous year, 2011, there had been 309,091; 2010’s arrivals were 288,272 and 2009 271,958.
You have to go back to 2001 for a higher arrival figure – 334,071 – and the best on public record, according to the Department of Tourism’s statistics online, was 2000 when a bumper 354,087 came to the Cayman Islands.
The largest market for Cayman tourism by far was the United States, which accounted for 253,209 of those visitors (78.7 per cent) in 2012 and 242,929 (78.6 per cent) in 2011. The jump of 10,280 on a year on year comparison equated to a 4.2 per cent increase in arrivals. By source market, the Northeast comprised 26.5 per cent in 2012 (27.7 per cent in 2011); Midwest 17.8 per cent (17 per cent in 2011); Southeast 14.3 per cent (14.8 per cent in 2011); Southwest 14.6 per cent (13.6 per cent in 2011) and the West Coast 5.5 per cent (5.4 per cent in 2011).
The second largest source market both in 2011 and 2012 was Canada, benefitting from the introduction of WestJet flights to add to the Air Canada service. In 2012, Canada produced 7.5 per cent of air arrivals and in 2011 this was 8 per cent. European travellers comprised 6.6 per cent in 2012, down from 6.8 per cent in 2011. This was split in 2012 between UK and Ireland (4.2 per cent 2012; 4.4 per cent in 2011) and Continental Europe (2.6 per cent 2012; 2.4 per cent in 2011. Individual countries are not specified in the Department of Tourism’s figures. To round off the statistics, ‘Other’ accounted for 7.1 per cent in 2012 and the remaining 6.6 per cent in 2011.
Every visitor recorded by the Cayman Islands Immigration Department was counted as a tourist arrival. In addition, 117 records entered as tourists also had a reported country of permanent residence being Cayman Islands; 87 records entered as tourists also had a stated purpose as returning resident.
12,649 tourist arrival records, or 4 per cent of the total tourist arrivals, had unknown country information and had to be estimated by using the known citizenship information. Of the 309,001 visitor records in 2012 with known values for the country field, 95 per cent of them had a country value that equaled the citizenship value, according to the tourism department’s website. Similarly, 21,396 tourist arrival records, or 8 per cent of the total US tourist arrivals, had unknown regional information and had to be estimated. Of this number, 8,323 records had data missing, and were been estimated as US arrivals based on citizenship information. Finally, 13,073 records are known to be US arrivals but were missing valid zip code information.
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