TCI Tourism Arrivals down, long stay visitors up

Turks and Caicos, March 16, 2017 – Grand Turk – Turks and Caicos experienced a boom in long stay visitors and a drop in cruise ship arrivals and an overall decrease in tourists for 2016 according to recently released statistics by the TCI Tourist Board.

Grand Turk got 82,000 less cruise ship passengers in for last year when it was projected that the trend would be to see the capital grow as a cruise destination.  From 929,737 thousand cruise arrivals in 2015 to 846,963 arrivals in 2016 – this would be a significant hit to government revenue and tourism businesses in GT.

The better news is that when it came to stop over arrivals, there was a robust 17.5% spike or over 68,000 more guests staying in our destination.   This trend is welcomed and causes the TCI to be recorded as the fastest growing destination in the region.  Still, it is an inescapable fact that we got less tourists in 2016 due to that fall off in visitor numbers in Grand Turk at the Cruise Center.

For 2015 the country was with one million, 315 thousand plus tourists arriving from January to December; for the same period in 2016, we dropped to one million, 300 thousand, 575 visitors –a difference of 14,683 tourists.

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