The 2013 tourism outlook for Jamaica appears mixed, particularly with regard to cruise-ship arrivals, though the island has seen an increase in airlift from new markets like Russia, while several new megaprojects could give the industry a boost.
Nearly 680,000 Americans, including 15,649 residents of Puerto Rico, owe their jobs to bilateral trade and investment between the Netherlands and the United States.
Despite a U.S. State Department travel advisory warning Haiti-bound Americans about violent crime, infectious diseases and substandard medical facilities, several large tourism projects are proceeding as planned in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
Cheddi Jagan International Airport is about to undergo a dramatic transformation that will enable Guyana’s only air link to the outside world to receive larger, heavier aircraft — boosting direct passenger traffic to and from Europe and North America.
In March 1913, a German daredevil named George Schmidt made local history when he flew his monoplane over Georgetown, dropping messages from the sky.
With just over 10 million people, the Dominican Republic is the second-largest Caribbean nation after Cuba. But the D.R. is clear and away the regional leader when it comes to tourism. In 2012, more than 4.56 million tourists visited the country by air, a 5.9 percent increase over the year before. Of the total, just under 639,000 were non-resident Dominicans abroad.
Economic difficulties in Curaçao — the largest Dutch-speaking island in the recently dissolved Netherlands Antilles confederation — as well as political uncertainty in nearby Venezuela, are affecting retailers ahead of a planned hike in the country’s sales tax on luxury products such as perfumes, jewelery and electronics from 6 percent to 9 percent.
A record 2.84 million tourists visited Cuba last year, up 4.5 percent from 2011 figures (by comparison, only 326,000 tourists came to Cuba in 1989). More than one million of them came from Canada, with large numbers also visiting from the United States — mainly Cuban-American exiles and those on specially licensed humanitarian or people-to-people excursions. Other important sources of tourism to Cuba are Latin America, Russia and, increasingly, China.
Barbados, an island highly dependent on tourism, is reeling under continued economic difficulties in Europe — its main tourism market — as well as a pending hike in the U.K. airline passenger duty and several violent attacks against British nationals.
One of the Caribbean’s top tourism destinations, the Bahamas, now has a world-class international airport to boast about. Yet who will foot the bill for this strikingly modern, $409.5 million expansion project remains a matter of controversy.
Visitor traffic to the Caribbean region should increase by 4 percent to 5 percent this year, reports the Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization. That follows strong growth in 2012 that saw the islands of the Caribbean welcome 25 million visitors — 5.4 percent more than in 2011 and the largest number of stay-over visitors in five years.
Jamaican security officials are cracking down on telephone and Internet lottery scams that prey on elderly Americans, then drain their victims’ bank accounts to finance drug trafficking and other illegal activities that fuel violence throughout the Caribbean island.
BOWIE, Md. — With a prayer and a speech, Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s former ambassador to the United States, has officially launched A Dollar A Tree for Haiti Inc.
Donna Christiansen, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ non-voting delegate to Congress, is aggressively defending her territory’s right to use rum excise-tax rebates to lure companies such as Diageo to its shores.
Puerto Rico isn’t a country, so unlike most of its English-speaking Caribbean neighbors, it doesn’t have an embassy in Washington. And it’s not a state either, so it can’t send to Congress the eight lawmakers — two senators and six representatives — its population of 3.7 million would warrant under statehood.
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