It’s not simply all the brand new flights, or the resort occupancy progress, or the new-look waterfront in Charlotte Amalie.
There’s a palpable dynamism within the US Virgin Islands proper now. You realize it while you board a completely-full flight from Miami to St Thomas in the midst of July.
And also you actually noticed it this previous week on the inaugural US Virgin Islands Tourism Summit, a high-level convention on native and regional tourism that was the right instance of why this vacation spot is performing so strongly proper now.
“We proceed to be a frontrunner in regional tourism,” stated US Virgin Islands Tourism Commissioner Joseph Boschulte, who organized the summit together with USVI Governor Albert Bryan, Jr on the Westin Seaside Resort in St Thomas.
Whereas Caribbean locations often have native resort affiliation conferences, this was one thing completely different: an in-depth take a look at the state of tourism and the broader regional business, with the general public sector proper alongside the non-public sector. The sort of convention you typically see on the regional stage — however nearly by no means in a single Caribbean vacation spot.
It was a mannequin for the area, geared toward pushing the envelope additional for an business that by all goal measures is already performing proper on the high of the regional customary.
And the fact is that, significantly for the reason that coronary heart of the pandemic, US Virgin Islands tourism is doing properly. Very properly.
Because of a tourism renaissance that started with an expertly-managed, health-sensitive reopening, the vacation spot is seeing the most effective numbers it has ever seen.
This 12 months, the USVI is predicted to see a 24 % enhance in airlift arrivals, in comparison with 2023.
The primary quarter of 2024 noticed a 26.5 % soar over Q1 in 2023, Boschulte stated.
That quantity was a 63 % enhance over the primary quarter of 2019.
As was famous through the summit, for years the USVI’s wheelhouse was not stayover tourism. It was cruise. However when the pandemic shut down cruise site visitors, the vacation spot shortly shifted its focus to stayover progress, and that’s helped result in the territory’s new tourism growth.
After all, cruise tourism has come again in earnest, significantly in St Croix, which is a comparatively new cruise vacation spot — with a 77 % enhance in arrivals projected this 12 months.
“We proceed to see rise ship arrivals go up,” Boschulte stated.
The summit lined the whole lot from a take a look at the broader Caribbean market to a dialogue on bettering the tourism product to extra dialed-in classes on the whole lot from native enterprise search engine optimization to customer reserving patterns.
“We’re doing very well, however there’s nonetheless loads of work to be completed to maximise tourism,” Bryan, Jr. stated. “However how can we maximize tourism? How can we make it possible for we’re getting the most effective of each vacationer that comes right here, and that they’re seeing the most effective of us?”
