Tourism continues to be a key driver in all aspects of Barbados’ economy and has formed a principle component in our Red Book content. This year we present a collection of useful reference statistics about the industry, including total stay over arrivals, a deeper dive into some key markets and a more nuanced look at the arrival numbers.

The Big Picture

Stay over arrivals set another record last year with 663,511 total stay over visitors. This also included nine months with individual best arrival numbers. Since the most recent low in 2013, arrivals have recovered by 30%, however last year saw a 5% year on year growth, which is a slowdown from 2015 and 2016 growth rates.

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Important Source Markets

Our three largest individual source markets continue to be the UK, USA, and Canada, but looking closer at them, we note that while growth trends remain strong for North America, the UK has plateaued with 2017 representing a slight decline over 2016.

Purpose of Visit

As would be expected, the overwhelming majority
of our visitors are accounted for by those visiting for
pleasure. In the last three years these visitors made
up 75% of the stay over arrivals. The chart below gives
a break down of the numbers for the last three years, 72,087 a notable category is that of crew, which since explicit
tracking started in 2015 has seen nearly 30k arrivals
a year, nearly 5% of our total arrivals annually.

                                                                  Click on the image to view chart larger