NASSAU, THE BAHAMAS - The Caribbean’s recovery from last year’s hurricanes is being helped enormously by visitors from Canada.

At a press conference at the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s State of the Tourism Industry Conference (SOTIC) here last Friday, officials said the crucial U.S. market was down 15.8 per cent in the first half of this year.

But visits from Canada in the first six months of 2018 were up 4.7 per cent, rising to a record 2.4 million visitors.

“When you consider the population of Canada as a whole is less than 40 million, that’s nothing short of remarkable,” CTO secretary general and CEO Hugh Riley told assembled journalists at the SOTIC sessions.

The regional trend in Canadian arrivals was led by growth in Antigua & Barbuda (81.5 per cent5), Belize (43.0 per cent), St. Vincent & the Grenadines (13.4 per cent) and the Cayman Islands (10.3 per cent) as most (13 out of 18) of the reporting destinations reported increases in arrivals from this market. Additional airline capacity into the region and favourable economic conditions in Canada motivated the gains. Antigua & Barbuda further benefitted from improved target marketing efforts in the marketplace, CTO officials said.

Last year’s hurricanes did serious damage to several Caribbean islands, with a concurrent slam from tourism numbers as well.

Visitation to the British Virgin Islands fell a whopping 70.1 per cent, while storm-battered Anguilla saw visits fall 51.4 per cent. The U.S. Virgin Islands were hit by both Irma and Maria and saw visits fall by 51.2 per cent, while Puerto Rico saw a decline of 47.7 per cent.

The CTO said similar drops are expected for St. Maarten and Dominica once those figures become available.

In an interview with TravelPulse Canada, Riley said the CTO is working closely with Canadian and American travel agents to boost the Caribbean’s fortunes.

“We do regular webinars and travel agents are expecting we’ll do more of those,” Riley said. “We’ve also strengthened our relations with Travel Leaders. They represent 40,000 travel agents across North America, so that provides a conduit to agents. That’s critically important.”

“We also keep our relationship strong with the travel industry media,” he said. “We make sure we collaborate with our member countries by providing pre- and post-tours for our events. We collaborate with them on fam trips for agents.

“And, I almost forgot, we also make sure we provide specialized training agents need to sell the Caribbean. Some of our member countries have their own specialist programs but we also collaborate to create speciality programs.”

Riley said the CTO was in Las Vegas in August for the Virtuoso travel conference and will be at Travel Mart in London to meet with European agents and other travel experts.