Visitor Arrivals to SVG show increase

Tourism minister, Cecil McKie says that there has been significant improvement in St Vincent and the Grenadines’ tourism sector this year.

McKie, at a press conference this week, released figures for visitor arrivals to St Vincent and the Grenadines from January to October.

“Our arrival numbers by air would have gone up a further 4.2 per cent and arrivals by sea went up 60.9 per cent for the period January to October,” he said.

The minister said it has been a trend over the last couple years for same day visitors to reflect a deduction. And that is no different for this year.

However, McKie noted that 260,000 persons visited the destination so far from January to October, 77,000 more than those that visited last year in the same period.

“Three months to go, normally November and December are very full months so we are confident that at the end of the year, we’ll also be able to reflect good figures,” the tourism minister said.

He added that the main source markets: United States of America reflected an increase of 13.2 per cent while Canada increased by 12.2 per cent and the United Kingdom increased by a little more that 7 per cent.

McKie also said that the sector has seen a number of other developments in the month of December.

He mentioned that The Liming, a new hotel owned by Vincentian, Kelly Glass and scotsman, Jonathon Milne, had its soft opening in Bequia two weekends ago.

The hotel has eleven villas of varying sizes and McKie said that the owners hope to add a spa, tennis court and gym to the facility in 2019.

The tourism minister also mentioned the ARC+ sailing event which was held last weekend and saw a number of yachts visiting this country.

“That event was quite successful,” he said. “As I understand, we have 10 boats already booked for next year’s ARC in St Vincent and the Grenadines; what they try to do is get new yachts on board every year, so we have 10 new yachts have already registered for ARC+ 2019 which again will be in December.”