Letter from a reader:
With regard to your article on Saturday, July 27th, “A question we should ask ourselves”, some thoughts.
First it’s not the 122,573 visitors we received in June we should be alarmed at. It’s that of those 122,573 31.2% were staying in “other accommodation” (mostly short term rental accommodation or with friends and family) rather than in hotels or timeshare resorts up from the 26.1% who did so in June 2023. While the overall number of visitors grew by 20.7% the increase in the number using other accommodation was 44.2%.
And that is the case for the first six months of 2024, with the number of visitors using other accommodation growing from 28.6% in the first six months of 2023 to 33.0% in the first six months of this year.
So, the question we should ask ourselves, with relatively fewer visitors using hotels or resorts, what has the impact on tourism spending been?
In my view this is the real question we should be asking ourselves.
If the tourism economy is so important to Aruba, and the government’s strategy is to attract a higher spending visitor, why is there so little current data available for tourist spending patterns?
The Central Bank publishes its Tourism Credit and Debit numbers, but the most recent numbers are for the fourth quarter of 2023. Nothing for 2024.
The ATA has a number of Country Profiles on its website www.ata.aw but only the profile for US visitors has some mention of expenditure (and that is of credit card spending by users of MasterCard), nothing on overall spending by US visitors. Other market profiles for Canada, Europe and Latin America, have no mention of expenditures of the visitors from those markets.
The Central Bureau of Statistics’ most recent tourism expenditure numbers are for 2019. 2019!!
So, while we keep track of visitor arrival numbers we do not keep track of something much more important, which is how much do our visitors spend?
But our competitors do. Mexico (INEGI) recently released its average expenditure figures for international tourists arriving by air for the period January – May 2024 and they show a 2.3% YTD increase from US$1,190.20 per visitor in the first five months of 2023 to US$1,217.30 in the same five months of 2024. But inflation in Mexico is running at 5% pa so that is negative growth in real terms.
And the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic recently released the numbers for average per trip expenditure of nonresidents for the first six months of 2024. These numbers showed an average expenditure of US$1,311.68 for the first half of 2024, up 6.8% compared with the US$1,228.46 for the first half of 2023. Inflation in the DR is running at 3.5% pa thus far in 2024 so that diminishes the tourist spend somewhat in real terms.
So, these two examples suggest average visitor spend is not growing that quickly.
Let me repeat the question. If tourism is so important to Aruba why do we not have similar information?
Which spills over to the second key question. How much of the tourism income stays in Aruba? Interestingly in 2013 the Central Bureau of Statistics established a Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) which can readily answer that question. It produced a very detailed explanation of how a TSA would work. But because we do not collect the key tourist expenditure data, while we have the model in place, we cannot produce any useful information.
Interestingly Aruba’s Central Bureau of Statistics does keep good numbers for Aruba’s foreign trade which show in the first quarter of 2024 Aruba imported AFL 679.3 million worth of goods, up 3.0% from the AFL 659.5 million in imported goods in the first quarter of 2023. Unfortunately, they don’t track tourism activity (which is a service export) so that can’t be matched against the import and export of physical goods.
And you ask about cruise tourism. It isn’t about how many alleged cruise visitors we get because that number is actually the number of cruise passengers cleared to land by Immigration if they so choose to, as the key number is how many actually get off the boat.
Belize does keep track of this and their data show that in the first six months of 2024 81.5% of its cruise visitors actually disembarked, down from 84.0% in the same six months of 2023. That may be just Belize but it is worth noting that anecdotes from other destinations suggest the same trend of fewer passengers leaving the ship.
We should also keep track of the number of passengers who disembark.
The real issue to me is that we should be tracking income not arrivals but the powers that be, for whatever reason, don’t seem inclined to do that, while other countries don’t seem to have that issue.
Tourism Analytics
