Although the first four months of this year saw steady growth in air arrivals to Cayman, a drop in flight frequency in a key market over the summer months is likely to impact numbers.
As of the end of April, a total of 187,152 visitors flew into Cayman, nearly 13,000 more than arrived during the same period last year, according to Department of Tourism statistics.
Rosa Harris, director of tourism, in an interview on Compass TV’s Forefront show, said the arrival numbers for 2025 are tracking higher than 2024.
She noted that Cayman has a “revisitation rate” of 46%, meaning, she said, that “when persons travel to the Cayman Islands, they decide to come back, based on the experience they have had here”.
She said that her department had been “very purposeful” last year with its marketing and advertising campaigns, the timing of which coincided with the US presidential election.
“We placed an incremental amount of dollars in markets because we knew that there would be a lot of noise in the marketplace,” she said.
She added that forecasts for 2025 had “looked a little soft”, so the money spent on those marketing campaigns had paid off in terms of return on investment.
The focus of the department has now shifted to the summer season, a traditionally slower time of year in terms of tourist arrivals.
Fewer summer flights on JetBlue to JFK
Airline seat capacity for Cayman over the summer is expected to be impacted by JetBlue reducing the frequency of flights between New York’s JFK International Airport and Owen Roberts International Airport during the summer months.
“We’ve lost some capacity out of JFK on JetBlue,” Harris said, explaining that the airline is “going through a restructuring and transformation in their business strategy and profit assessment, so the Caribbean lost a lot of capacity there.”
Up until the end of August, JetBlue flights between Cayman and JFK have been reduced to once a week on Saturdays, and no flights are scheduled for the month of September, the JetBlue booking website indicates. Between 4-25 Oct., flights will again be once a week on Saturdays, before reverting to five times a week from 26 Oct. to 20 Dec., and then daily through the Christmas period until the end of April next year.
Harris acknowledged that with the loss of those JetBlue seats during the summer months, “where we would expect New Yorkers to travel, that’s a major hit” from a year-round key market.
Winter season looking optimistic
She added that it would be “almost impossible to make up the amount of seats that we lost, so we know the summer is going to be touch and go for 2025”, but said things look much more optimistic for the winter period, with more seats available on board several North American airlines.
“We have Porter, American, Delta and many of the United Airlines key gateways, all with increased capacity,” Harris said.
For example, there will be the recently announced addition of two new routes — Toronto and Ottawa — on Canada’s Porter Airways.
While demand for a sun holiday, within easy reach, is high in the US during the chilly winter months, Harris notes that travellers from some states, like Texas, would welcome getting out of the summer heat there and into the “warm Caribbean breeze”, so said airline seats in summer months could also be filled, if they were made available.
Certainly, hotel, Airbnb and Vrbo rooms are available all year round, she said.
“We have almost 8,500 rooms in our short-term rental pool,” she said. “That doesn’t change from winter to summer very much; if anything, it’s been on an upward growth trajectory. That creates a demand for airlift.”
It is that room stock that helped convince American Airlines to relaunch an evening flight between Miami and Grand Cayman for a trial six-month period, which will run from October to April.
“It took us three years of negotiation with American” for that agreement to be made, Harris said. After some unfruitful discussions, she said, “We decided to change how we spoke to the airlines. We decided to show them the growth in our room stock.”
Among the new rooms coming on board in the next 18 months or so, she said, are the Grand Hyatt and One | GT.
Wooing American Airlines
Harris said, “We focused on that and the Airbnb [and Vrbo] market. … Those two areas were of particular interest to American, and they wanted data on Vrbo and Airbnb and how much room nights that represented for us as jurisdiction, and they wanted to understand how many hotel rooms we had coming on board.”
Accompanied by representatives of the private sector, including from the Chamber of Commerce and the Cayman Islands Tourism Association, the Department and Ministry of Tourism met with American Airlines and “painted the picture of the Cayman Islands business opportunity”.
She acknowledged that the first she’d heard that American Airlines had decided to try out the evening route was when former Chamber president Joanne Lawson called Harris to say she had booked a 7pm October flight on the airline.
Initially, American only scheduled one single month of evening flights, but Harris said, “With our follow up and advocacy, they then reached out and said they were going to extend the season until April.”
She added, “So, I would say these small steps of improvement and commitment and partnership are all positive and now we have a task at hand to ensure the service does well, as all services to Cayman, and we’re able to do that yearround.”
The Department of Tourism is also looking to expand into the Texas market, which, the director said, “has a lot more visitation to give”. This includes potentially running a Cayman Airways flight to Austin, which could help service fringe markets like San Antonio and Waco.
Diversifying into more northern states is also being considered, as well as a Phoenix, Arizona flight route, which Harris said is a market prime for growth.
Watch the full Forefront interview here.
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