The tourism industry is on track to return next year to about 40% of the stayover visitor numbers of 2019, but tourists may find it difficult to get a plane ticket to come here for the festive season this month.
Responding to opposition questions in Parliament’s Finance Committee on Monday about the tourism outlook and government’s strategy, Director of Tourism Rosa Harris confirmed that a 40% target of the 2019 stayover arrivals remained achievable.
“Our target for 2022 is 201,702 passengers,” she said.
Airlift a challenge
The most difficult aspect of reopening had been to secure airlift because Cayman entered the winter season late as many airlines were balancing global employee shortages against returning to destinations.
Cayman has a very high return rate of travellers and demand is strong, Harris said.
“But as we move into the holiday period over the next three weeks, getting to the Cayman Islands in truth is a difficult task; finding an available seat.”
In recent weeks, Harris said, “We’ve had connections with the accommodation sector and our national airline Cayman Airways to ensure that we prioritise the scheduling for the festive season and for the hoteliers to fill those seats for Cayman Airways.”
The airlift situation should start to improve with the return of American Airlines flights from Miami and Charlotte.
WestJet will follow the lead of Air Canada, which brought its first passenger to Cayman on Saturday, and restart flights to Toronto on 16 Dec.
Cayman Airways is also bringing back two important hubs for the tourism – New York and Tampa – in December, Harris said.
The definitive return of some airlines in the first quarter of 2022 is still subject to change, as there remains uncertainty around the new omicron variant of the coronavirus and the ongoing impact of COVID-19 continues to dent travel confidence.
In addition to the airlines, the Department of Tourism is focussing particularly on the travel trade that sells trips to Cayman.
Although the budget for addressing travel agents and wholesalers has been reduced slightly, the director of tourism said, “we still feel confident that the 40% is very achievable in 2022”.
Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan claimed that, while the sector may not surpass 40%, a new focus on quality would have a much higher effect in terms of revenue and employment than under the last administration’s approach to tourism.
Former tourism minister Moses Kirkconnell responded that Cayman had the highest per capita tourism spend in 2018 and 2019, which showed that quality had always been a priority for stayover tourism.
Diversification
Kirkconnell also questioned whether attempts to diversify the sector to tourism from South and Latin America would take attention away from core source markets in North America.
Bryan said while South America was not always recognised as an attractive market, it contained a large percentage of potential affluent visitors. Cayman Airways, with its new fleet of aircraft could also do more and still serve core markets.
Harris, in turn, explained that targeting the South America region intends to address the seasonality of Cayman’s tourism industry, which peaks from December to April, and to take advantage of the fact that Southern hemisphere countries experience winter during Cayman’s slower tourism period.
Promotions
The tourism department’s promotional activity, she noted, is going to shift from traditional print and radio to digital and TV.
Because of the continuing changes in response to the pandemic, the department needs to be able to change content quickly. Most advertising dollars will be spent on television and addressable TV.
Harris said the department has the data to know right down to the neighbourhood which house to place a TV commercial in, based on viewer profiles and interests that provide clues about a household’s spending behaviour.
The popular pre-pandemic ‘Dream in Cayman’ campaign will be updated, with production teams carrying out video shoots on Grand Cayman and Little Cayman scheduled from next week.
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Targeting tourists from South America has been tried before and was, and still is, a pipe dream. The affluent will always travel to Florida or other U.S. destinations where they can combine beach resorts with their all important goal of luxury shopping.
Here’s a suggestion to the CIG that might get “airlift”: OPEN UP.
STOP hassling people with dumb tests every other day on their expensive vacation – most of them are just going to sit around on the beach all day anyways.
STOP being so cruel and not allowing kids to join families on vacations or to visit their relatives.
Just open up already.
I just returned to USA from Cayman 2 weeks ago, so I know how the process works. It is quite unpleasant and I won’t be back until the process changes.
How unpleasant? We own an apartment near 7MB that i just remodeled in time for the holidays that will be sitting empty. I planned to fly may family of 4 down for the holidays. Christmas in Cayman is our favorite.
My wife, daughter and myself are vaccinated and have boosters, my son has had Covid and there are solid medical reason that i do not want him to get the vaccine.
So, first point is we don’t have time for a quarantine but besides that, the PCR test are horrendous in Cayman.
The ones i had in USA were not that bad but each one I have had in Cayman was incredibly painful. I have a high tolerance to pain but I will do whatever it takes not to get another in Cayman. I had to have 3 of them in Cayman during my last visit.
Never again, all three health staff that gave me a PCR test here just jam the stick up my nostril as far as it will go then push a little harder for good measure until it caused pain in my eyeball. I will not subject my family to them either.
I hope Dr. Lee reads this, there must be a better solution. Until am assured that i won’t have to be subjected to PCR test, I wont be back.
That’s an interesting story. I decided long ago to not even think about coming back to Cayman until they are fully open and this seals the deal – especially if the medical staff don’t even understand how to properly administer the test.
The really crazy part is that community transmission is so widespread in Cayman now that they would IMPROVE the situation by bringing in a bunch of vaccinated tourists!
There is NO WAY that Cayman gets to 40% without allowing KIDS; and getting rid of the ridiculous LFT tests. How many LFT tests have been positive in travellers since re-opening? 3 or 4? Meanwhile, there has been 2000+ positives in the community, from community transmission. Stop hassling and taxing the tourists even further. CaymanKind.
I can’t help but believe that major airlines are still reluctant to commit themselves to scheduling flights here after they had to cancel so many flights when the government, in a knee-jerk reaction to a group of school kids testing positive for Covid, abruptly canceled the original re-opening plan until late December.
As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”