Barbados Booming Out of Canada

Barbados is experiencing unprecedented growth out of Canada, including a record-breaking month in January.

The latest figures were enthusiastically revealed on a visit to Toronto in mid July by a high profile delegation of tourism execs from the island led by Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI) chariman Alvin Jemmot, who called the Canadian market performance “phenomenal,” adding that Barbados is “seeing growth in 2015 at rates never seen before” out of Canada.

Canada already ranks as Barbados’ third largest market, accounting for 24% of the country’s business.

The chairman praised the team at BTMI’s Canadian office for their efforts to make Barbados the “destination of choice in the Caribbean,” while BTMI’s CEO William Griffith observed that, in order to succeed in tourism, destinations need committed partners selling the destination.

William Griffith told the Toronto gathering that between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2015, preliminary results indicate that Canadian arrivals to Barbados were up by 22.9% – that’s 8,500 more visitors than the previous year, contributing to a total of 45,484 Canadian arrivals during the first half of 2015.

In record-breaking January, more than 10,000 Canadians visited the island – a 24% increase over the same month in 2014.
And Griffith promised the island would “do even better in the next six months” out of Canada.

Such significant growth has been spurred by additional air lift from both Air Canada and WestJet, and significant hotel development on the island, which includes the opening of Sandals Barbados in January.

In total, Griffith says Barbados will see a total investment of US$1 billion by 2019 that will result in 2,300 more hotel rooms (including plans for a new Beaches resort on the island).

There will also be approximately 30 new or updated restaurants arriving this year alone.

Add a huge variety of annual events, such as the Crop Over Festival; Barbados Open Water Festival; Food, Wine & Rum Festival; and Run Barbados; and Barbados will continue to prove popular with visitors, including, as the stats already suggest, Canadians.

(https://www.travelpress.com/subscription/IDEA/100815_072715_ctp/#?page=1)