Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, 3 April 2017 – A part of the Department of Tourism’s ongoing 2017 strategy is growing visitation. Particular areas of focus are targeted to support increased growth in stay over visitors during the slower visitation months with in market promotions, addressing seasonality.

With this goal in mind the destination is seeing some success; February 2017 arrivals were the second highest recorded visitation month for the Cayman Islands with 35,547 visitors choosing the Cayman Islands. Most notably the USA—the destination’s primary source market—saw an increase of 4.47% over the same month in 2016. Overall this year the Cayman Islands visitor arrival numbers have remained relatively flat with just over 67,000 stay over visitors (67,181) coming to our shores in the first two months of 2017.

“The continued success of our tourism industry relies on the robust strategies that the Ministry and Department of Tourism have been putting in place to address the flattening of our arrival numbers,” said Tourism Minister, the Hon Moses Kirkconnell. “We will continue to implement our long term strategic initiatives to create unique programming to build awareness of our beautiful islands to both established visitation source markets as well as new areas where we have identified to be potential growth areas.”

Cruise arrivals for the month of February were the best in 10 years with some 189,704 guests coming ashore. The first two months of 2017 saw 370,794 cruise ship passengers as compared to 372,747 in 2016—a difference of less than 1%. Notable severe weather in the earlier part of the year caused scheduled ships to divert from the Cayman Islands.

Director of Tourism, Mrs Rosa Harris, said, “The Cayman Islands is regarded as a premier destination of choice, which is evidenced by the visitor acclaim we receive year over year. So far in 2017 we have been ranked by TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Awards, one of the industry’s most recognized ranking systems, as the 12^th best beach in the world; named #22 in the Top Destinations in the World; and #3 Top 10 Destinations in the Caribbean. This speaks to the efforts made by the DOT and our tourism partners to distinguish ourselves in ways that are welcoming and wholly satisfying to the visitor experience. We applaud all those industry leaders in the Cayman Islands who also earned individual recognition by TripAdvisor’s discerning travellers and will continue our efforts to ensuring more people get to experience our Caymankind approach to all that we do.”

Detailed arrival statistics for the Cayman Islands can be found on the Department of Tourism website at http://www.caymanislands.ky/statistics.aspx

Visit https://www.tripadvisor.com/TravelersChoice to see the full list of 2017 Travelers’ Choice awardees.

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IMAGE: ieyenews File Stingray City