Cruise arrivals soar in the Cayman Islands

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands: Cruise ship passengers arrived in the Cayman Islands in record numbers for the month of September, surpassing 100,000 for the summer month for the first time in history, according to figures recently released by the Department of Tourism.

The 113,258 cruise passengers that arrived during September represented a 63 percent increase over the record number that arrived in the same period last year.

The September number even slightly surpassed the 111,875 cruise passengers that arrived in August, the first time that has happened. Last year, cruise arrivals dropped 45 percent from August to September, and in 2001 they dropped 33 percent.

All together through the end of September, 1,288,644 cruise ship passengers have arrived in the Cayman Islands. Though the total figure for the entire year will not reach the 2.1 million projected earlier in the year, it will most likely hit the 1.75 million mark, nearly 200,000 passengers past last year's record number.

In December of this year, cruise ship passenger could surpass the 180,915 record for a single month, set in January of this year. On 16 December alone, over 20,000 cruise passengers are scheduled to come ashore, and ships are due in all but three days during the month.

Air arrivals for the month were nearly identical to 2002 at 11,336, only three persons more than last September. The month is traditionally the slowest month for stay-over tourists, with October being the second slowest.

Total air arrivals stand at 221,045 through three quarters of the 2003.

With only three months of statistics left to come, Cayman will almost assuredly fail to attract 300,000 stay-over tourists for the first time since the method of recording arrivals was changed in January 2000. It is quite possible that number could even dip below 290,000. For comparison, there were 354,087 air arrivals in 2000, and 334,071 in 2001 when there was a major drop-off in air arrivals in the last quarter after the terrorist attacks in the United States.

November should offer relief from the air arrival decline that starts in August, as historically the month should closely resemble both January and May from a stay-over tourist standpoint.

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