9 September 2024
International visitor arrivals decreased by 1.8% in the first seven months of 2024 in comparison to the same period in 2023 according to Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).
The continuing downward trend for the fourth consecutive month and a particularly poor July suggest that the tourism ministry’s goal of receiving 3.2m visitors this year may now be hard to achieve. In 2023 Cuba received 2.4mn visitors. The published figures raise questions about Cuba’s plans for economic recovery as to a significant extent it depends on revenues from tourism.
Analysis by Aruba-based Tourism Analytics of the published stopover numbers, which include visitors arriving by cruise ship, show that these fell to 1.47mn between 1 January and 31 July this year compared to the 1.49mn received in the same period in 2023.
The consultancy also notes, citing ONEI’s figures: that in July 2024 Cuba’s total international tourist arrivals decreased by 19.7%, falling from 190,775 in July 2023 to 153,261 in July 2024; that Cuba received 44,579 stopovers from Canada in July 2024, or 29.1% of all stopovers received for the month, a figure down 5.2% compared with July 2023; and the number of visitors from Russia decreased by 46.5% in July, falling from 19,894 in July 2023 to 10,637 in July of this year.
It said that in the first seven months of 2024 Canada remained Cuba’s number one source market with a 42.5% share, but total stopover tourist arrivals from there fell by 1.3% to 622,128 compared to 630,039 in the same period of 2023. In the case of Russia, the number of visitors increased by 41.0% in the first seven months of 2024, to 123,358 from 87,506 in the comparative period in 2023. Cubans living abroad, a category Cuba counts separately, accounted for 179,746 of all international visitors in the first seven months of 2024 (a 12.3% share), down 14.4% from the 210,026 (a 14.1% share) recorded for the same seven months of 2023.
9 September 2024, Issue 1247
Highlights in this issue:
- Gaviota announces the opening of more new hotels
- Locations for new, probably smaller wind farms across Cuba identified
- Foreign investors put forward proposals to address Havana’s serious garbage problem
- Cabañas says US policy unlikely to change dramatically whoever wins Presidency
- Russia and Cuba ‘considering closer military co-operation’
Over the same seven-month period US visitors, who can only travel to Cuba under licence, marginally increased to 83,136 arrivals from 82,288 in 2023. Other significant sources of arrivals were from 2
Germany, Mexico, France, the UK, Spain, and Argentina, although arrivals from all European nations remained weak in comparison to previous years.
James Hepple, the Managing Director of Tourism Analytics, told Cuba Briefing that Cuba has experienced something of a perfect storm, negatively affecting its tourism sector.
“The restrictions on US travel to Cuba put in place by the Trump administration in June 2019 had a huge impact in eliminating large numbers of visitors, “ he says. Cuba’s problems, he adds, “were compounded by its slow response to the removing of barriers to travel to the island during the pandemic, and while many competing destinations such as Mexico and the Dominican Republic reopened to tourist business by the third quarter of 2020, Cuba did not open its borders to international travel until November 2021 by which time many potential visitors had switched to alternative destinations.”
He observes too that European and Latin American business has been impacted by the decision by the US Department of State to designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in January 2021 which resulted in travellers who had visited Cuba on or after that date becoming ineligible for travel to the USA under its ESTA Visa Waiver Programme. “This is thought to have deterred a significant number of persons from choosing to visit Cuba,” Hepple says.
To try to increase arrivals numbers, Cuba is now hoping to encourage a greater number of visitors from Latin America and has been focusing recently on the Mexican market, Bolivia, and Colombia, as well as encouraging increased airlift from multiple potential global source markets.
Official figures produced in the first part of 2024 suggest that occupancy rates were as low as 35.5% in the first quarter of 2024. Despite this, Cuba’s President and ministers continue to describe tourism as a vital engine for economic growth, and the sector continues to absorb significant levels of official and state related investment.
In a seeming paradox, given the islands weak visitor arrivals numbers and low occupancy rates, Cuban state entities such as the military controlled enterprise Gaviota continue to build new hotels through wholly owned enterprises incorporated outside of Cuba to offer management and operating contracts to international hotel groups (see below).
In 2023 Cuba received 2.4mn visitors. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic Cuba received 4.2mn visitors in 2019 and 4.6mn in 2018.
The Caribbean Council is able to provide further detail about all of the stories in Cuba Briefing. If you would like a more detailed insight into any of the content of today’s issue, please get in touch.
