Cayman ‘aggressively’ wooing Latin American market

Tourism and airline officials from Cayman have been doing the rounds of trade shows and conferences in Latin America recently, in a concerted effort to bring a new market of visitors to the islands.

Director of Tourism Rosa Harris and her team are currently in São Paolo, Brazil, where they are exhibiting for the first time at the three-day World Travel Market Latin America. Last month, they attended the Routes Americas conference – the region’s leading air service development event – in Bogota, Colombia.

Harris says the Department of Tourism’s aviation strategy aims to “focus on Latin America and Europe to help flatten seasonality and bring new business to Cayman”.

Speaking to the Compass from São Paolo on Tuesday morning, Harris said the DoT team was in Brazil because it has representation there, as well as in Argentina and Mexico, through its PR agency PTG Consultancy, and is marketing Cayman strongly in each of these three countries.

She stressed that attending such shows and exploring a variety of options, from advertising and marketing through non-traditional means to exploring new markets and leads, is vital to the future of Cayman’s tourism because of the competition from destinations offering similar attractions as here.

While Cayman has often been represented at tourism and travel trade shows and conferences in the past, pre-COVID, the numbers of such events the DoT is visiting this year is unusual – part of an “aggressive effort to do everything possible to return to 2019 levels”, she said.

This plan is not unique to Cayman, by any means.

“Every show that we have gone to, all our competitors are present, so we have no choice but to show up and engage,” Harris explained.

She added, “It’s a very noisy marketplace, and we have to be aggressive to break through and find our customers. Don’t forget, we were the last to reopen [after COVID], so we’ve been on the back foot.”

Expanding market

Currently, the number of travellers from Latin America to Cayman may be small, but it’s an expanding market, Harris says.

In 2023, Latin America made up just 2% of tourism arrivals – or 5,820 travellers – a tiny figure compared to the 80% from the US, and also smaller than the 6% from Canada and 5% from the UK. But, Harris says, there is tremendous room for growth.

Already, more travellers from Latin America visited the Cayman Islands in the first three months of 2024 than for the entirety of 2023.

For the first quarter of this year, “we’re just 3% behind 2019 for Latin America, and 21.4% up over 2023,” Harris said. “So, the market is responding very well to the stimulation”.

The DoT has been specific in who it is targeting, which is why it is in Brazil, she explained. “There are more than 200 million people here in Brazil, and a lot of affluence. We’re not looking to get 200 million people, but we’re looking to get the right Brazilians to choose the Cayman Islands.”

With this in mind, Harris has contacted or held meetings with a number of Brazilian airlines, including COPA, Azul, GOL and LATAM.

“We met with COPA because COPA has an agreement with Cayman Airways to sell through Panama, so travellers from Latin America can connect on COPA and then go onwards to Cayman Airways from a ticketing and baggage-handling perspective for a seamless transition for them,” she said.

Cayman Airways announced its partnership with COPA last year when it revealed it was launching a direct route to Panama.

That “seamless transition” would also apply to Miami, Harris said, noting that a large population of Brazilians live there, or “just like Caymanians, love to go to Miami to shop, and will add on a vacation destination before they go back home”.

An estimated 475,000 Brazilians live in the Miami area.

Flattening seasonality

Brazil and other Latin American countries are also attractive for Cayman because of the reversed seasons – they have their winters while the US is having its summer. This means that in low season, when Americans don’t typically travel to Cayman in large numbers, focus could shift to travellers from Latin America.

“The question we need to ask is, can we continue to rely on the United States that delivers over 80% of our visitations, or do we want to be able to diversify and grow into new markets, growth markets, more European business, more Latin American business?” Harris said.

She feels the budgets spent on such travel shows are well worth it, as they’re part of Cayman’s longer-term plan to diversify its market and make the islands a year-round destination for tourists.

Accompanying the government’s tourism team are delegates from Cayman Airways, the Grand Cayman Marriott, Sun Vista DMC and the Wyndham Resort. On Monday, the first day of the WTM trade show, they held more than 20 meetings and took part in four media interviews, Harris said.

At the Routes Americas conference in Bogota, the delegation held more than 20 meetings with airlines and airports operating in the region.

In a statement issued by the Department of Tourism following that conference, it said it had discussed the expanded runway and facility upgrades at Owen Roberts International Airport, with the aim of attracting long-haul direct flights to and from Cayman. Those long-haul destination targets included Brazil, Peru and Argentina in the Americas and Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland in Europe, the DoT said.

Another conference attended by the Cayman tourism delegation was the Seatrade Cruise Global event in Miami Beach last week, where discussions were held on the islands’ capacity for cruise tourists and the possibility of building a cruise pier on Cayman Brac, among other topics.

‘Dating’ other airlines

At the Routes Americas conference in Colombia, while Cayman Airways held meetings with airport operators to discuss the feasibility of new routes, the DoT team was speaking with other airlines, the tourism director said.

“We had a booth where we took meetings with carriers that call into Cayman already, or that we’re pursuing for medium-to-long-haul new opportunities,” she said, adding, somewhat jokingly, “You know, the DoT is dating everybody, and Cayman Airways knows that.”

But, she hastened to add, her department does work with Cayman Airways on business development, and she sits on the airline’s commercial subcommittee.

“It’s really a joint effort in trying to recover to our best year on record, 2019 levels,” she said.

Numbers are steadily climbing back to those levels, with the first two months of this year seeing 93% of the figures recorded in January and February 2019. March’s figures have yet to be released, but are looking encouraging, Harris noted, as the Easter break fell during that month.

Advertising through influencers

As well as marketing through the more traditional channels of magazines and television and online, Cayman is also looking to spread the message of its attractiveness as a destination through other means – like influencers.

Harris gave the example of a Brazilian couple who visited the booth in São Paolo, with a pitch to travel to Cayman, which they would showcase to their 600,000 Instagram followers in Brazil.