The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) believes that the industry will return to a pre-COVID-19 pandemic norm in the Americas region that includes Barbados by the end of next year.
This was the forecast the WTTC published in its recently-released Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2022 report.
“It is estimated that in 2022, the sector could grow at an even faster rate of 36.1 per cent and it is expected to return to the 2019 levels by the end of 2023 (2023 as a whole will be only one per cent below the 2019 level),” the WTTC said in relation to the Americas.
“Between 2022 and 2032, the sector’s contribution to GDP is forecasted to grow at an annual average rate of 3.9 per cent – outpacing the two per cent forecasted average annual growth for the regional economy. Travel and tourism is also anticipated to create around 16 million new jobs in the region by 2032.
“After a dramatic fall of 45.5 per cent in 2020, the contribution of travel and tourism to GDP in the Americas recovered by 23.1 per cent in 2021, faster than the global average increase of 21.7 per cent”.
It said that the industry’s rate of recovery in the Caribbean (36.6 per cent) was stronger than that of Latin America (26.5 per cent) and North America (22.3 per cent).
The WTTC reasoned that this could, in part, “be attributed to the larger decline of travel and tourism’s contribution to GDP in the Caribbean in 2020 than in the other regions”.
“The fastest rates of recovery were witnessed in St Lucia, Bahamas, and Colombia; the sector in these countries rallied by 92.6 per cent, 88.9 per cent, and 83.8 per cent respectively,” the tourism body stated.
“The recovery of Travel & Tourism in the Americas was supported more so by a rebound in revenues from domestic travellers rather than international travellers, as the former increased by 28.8 per cent whilst the latter grew by 15.1 per cent,” it added. (SC)