Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan has announced that the stayover tourist numbers for November were the highest of this year, with 34,118 people flying to the islands.
This brings the total number of stayover arrivals between January and November to 236,348, which equates to 53% of 2019’s total arrival numbers.
Bryan and his Ministry of Tourism had set a target for 2022 of 40% of 2019’s numbers – equating to 200,000 visitors. By the end of last month, that target had been exceeded by more than 36,000 passengers, he told legislators in Parliament on Wednesday, 14 Dec.
Arrival numbers have been steadily ramping up since Cayman partially reopened its borders in October last year. COVID-19 travel restrictions were finally fully dropped in August this year.
Bryan said even the normally slow summer months of June and July had shown impressive numbers this year, with 26,106 and 32,356 arrivals, respectively.
He said the arrival numbers throughout the year had shown “vast improvement” from January when just 14% of January 2019 numbers were recorded.
Now, he said, “For the last quarter of this year, air arrivals are running at close to 90%” of the monthly 2019 levels.
The minister had also set a target of $15 million for tourism taxes and fees. By the end of October, $14.5 million had been collected, “just shy of the target”, he said, and with two months left in the year to make up the difference.
Explaining why the tax revenue statistics for November are not yet available, Bryan explained that tourism accommodation taxes are remitted on the 28th of the following month.
“Our tourism results clearly demonstrate that confidence in our destination is rebounding, both from passengers and industry partners,” Bryan said.
Cruise arrivals
Bryan had also set the same 40% target for cruise arrivals for this year.
By the end of November, the numbers were 38% of the 2019 figures, just 2% below target, and still with a month to go, he said, so he is confident that the target will be reached.
He reminded lawmakers that Cayman did not reintroduce cruise tourism until March this year, so only nine months of arrivals are being counted for 2022.
Between March and November, cruise lines made 206 stops here, bringing 614,959 passengers.
He said, as with air arrivals, November has also proved to be the most successful month for cruise passenger arrivals, with ships bringing 105,754 travellers to local shores.
However, with two major cruise lines – Royal Caribbean and Carnival – announcing they will not be bringing their newer megaships to Cayman because, without a cruise dock, it will take too long to bring passengers to shore by tenders, Bryan said it was unlikely 2023 or 2024 would reach 2019 figures.
He said the passenger count for Cayman from Royal Caribbean in 2019 was 400,000, and this was expected to go down to 330,000 in 2023 and to 300,000 in 2024, while Carnival, which had made 327 calls to Cayman in 2019 would be only making 171 next year.
The ministry is in talks with cruise lines like MSC and Holland-America, he said, to maintain and potentially increase their stops in Cayman.
Bryan said he intended to have discussions with cruise lines next year to talk about “flattening” the seasonality of cruise stops, so that the high and low seasons would not have such different numbers.
He has invited former tourism minister Moses Kirkconnell to take part in these talks, he said.
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