Tourism-Dependent Caribbean Sees Signs of Life on Travel Uptick
- Dominican Republic and Bahamas experiencing return of visitors
- Caribbean islands seek to benefit from pent-up travel demand
Some Caribbean nations are seeing signs of a recovery in tourism after border closures and the Covid-19 pandemic decimated their economies last year.
The Dominican Republic received 1.4 million visitors in the first five months of the year, a trend that should accelerate in the second half of 2021, Hector Manuel Valdez Albizu, the country’s central bank president, said in a webinar with Bloomberg. More than 390,000 people visited the country in May, a 20% increase on April, but still shy of the more than half a million visitors in May 2019.