Bermuda Tourism Industry Hit Hard By COVID-19 - caribbeannationalweekly.com

Bermuda’s tourism industry, wrecked by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March of last year, continued to struggle in the third quarter of the year, the latest visitor figures have shown.

The Bermuda Tourism Authority (BTA) said in a statement said there were just 30,516 leisure visitors to the island between July and September – down from 285,000 for the same period in pre-pandemic 2019, a year in which a record 808,242 visitors came to the island.

A total of 27,806 leisure visitors arrived by air in this year’s third quarter – down from 73,000 for the same period in 2019.

Cruise arrivals also plummeted from 215,000 in 2019 to just 2,710 this year – a drop of almost 99 percent.

Some cruise lines began homeporting in Bermuda in May, but traditional cruise calls did not restart until August with the arrival of the Crystal Symphony, followed by the Norwegian Breakaway, which made its first call to the island in late September.

Business traveler numbers also tumbled, hitting just 17.5 percent of 2019 levels.

So far this year a total of 45,713 visitors have come to Bermuda, which has a strict regime in place for testing returning residents as well as tourists for COVID-19, although active cases of the disease have dropped to 62 from an earlier high of more than 1,600. A total of 106 people have died.

A BTA spokeswoman said the latest figures “highlighted the sobering reality of persistent declines across various measures.

“Cruise travel continues to be among the hardest-hit categories and the report showed that cruise passenger volumes reflected just one percent of that seen in the same period in 2019.”

Visitor spending increased slightly, from $1,606 per person in 2019 to $1,980 per person in 2021.

But with lower visitor numbers, the total estimated air visitor spending was slashed from $136.8 million in 2019 to $55.8 million, a drop of almost 60 percent.

Hotels had 56 percent occupancy levels for the third quarter, a drop of 24.6 percent on 2019.

The average length of stay of visitors did increase to 7.85 days this year from 6.09 in 2019, which the BTA said reflected “a shift in visitor travel trends”.

BTA’s chief executive officer, Charles Jeffers II, said “tourism numbers fell off a cliff in 2020 and scaling up to 2019 heights will be a gradual process.

“With increased [COVID-10] vaccine uptake in many of our key markets, the sector recovery has begun, but the data shows that the impact of the pandemic remains with us.

“Bermuda is a high-value, attractive destination, but in this current environment we need to find ways to reduce obstacles to choosing Bermuda,” he added.

CMC