‍As the high Caribbean tourism season starts, the resilience of the industry in the region is again evident.

Although several nations were battered by hurricanes last year, travel to the Caribbean has kept growing.

In fact, cruise tourism reported record figures over the 2017-2018 cruise year. A study recently released by the industry body, the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA), reported cruise tourism expenditures of 3.36 billion dollars U.S. dollars, bettering the previous record of 2015 by six percent.

"We could not be prouder of these results and what they mean for all of our neighbors and partners throughout the Caribbean and Latin America," said Michele Paige, the FCCA's president.

The returns confirm the enduring popularity of the region, which in this case also includes Caribbean ports in countries like Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua, as a cruise destination.

“The Caribbean is not just the world's largest market for cruise vacations, it's also one of the most popular destinations in the world,” Arnold Donald, the chairman of Cruise Lines International Association and president and CEO of Carnival Corporation, one of the world's largest cruise operators, said in September.

On land, the hotel sector has experienced its eighth consecutive year of growth, according to the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA). 

Room occupancy was up slightly in September, the average daily rate rose by 3.1 percent and the all-important revenue per available room (RevPAR) increased 3.8 percent. 

"When one considers that several of the 30-plus destinations in the region are still recovering from the 2017 hurricane season, our performance is even more impressive," Frank Comito, director-general and CEO of the CHTA, told CGTN. 

The FCCA study, conducted by Business Research & Economic Advisors, said the spending came from 29.6 million passenger and crew onshore visits to 36 destinations. In addition, it said cruising generated 79,000 jobs paying more than 900 million dollars in wages during the period.

Many of those jobs are not on the ships themselves. In a presentation last year, Martha Honey, executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel, said only about 10 percent of the crews came from Caribbean nations, whose per capita incomes are generally much higher than favored recruitment centers like the Philippines, India and Eastern Europe.  

Traditionally, the two tourism sub-sectors have been at odds, with Caribbean hotels complaining over the years that the industry playing field wasn't level as they bore the brunt of industry taxation.

Comito said the CHTA was pleased to see all major areas of tourism continuing to expand, but he added in an emailed response, "Hotel accommodations unfairly bear the overwhelming brunt of taxes and fees, yet are by far the largest generator of employment, small business activity, and government revenue... We believe there needs to be a greater balance in how taxes and fees are levied against the industry overall, particularly as it applies to vacation home rentals and the cruise business."

When in the past some government tried to levy increased taxes on cruise passengers in what they felt was an attempt to redress the perceived imbalance, the liner companies rebelled amid charges that they played islands against each other.  

The Center for Responsible Travel, quoting 2015 statistics from the inter-governmental Caribbean Tourism Organization, said that of the total onshore spending of 30 billion dollars, cruise passengers contributed 2.4 billion and stayover tourists contributed 27.6 billion or 11.5 times higher.

Still, as the FCCA said, the sector is important to the livelihoods of thousands, as evidenced by state spending to improve infrastructure for the mega ships that have become a staple of cruises.

Notwithstanding the overall figures, results were skewed by last year's hurricane season, with destinations like British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, St. Maarten and the United States Virgin Islands seeing declines in cruise arrivals, though they have shown remarkable recovery, while Guadeloupe, Martinique, Bonaire and others experienced increases as a result of ship deployments. According to the study, all of this was “further proof that the Caribbean cruise industry is strong, and the member destinations, in all their beauty, continue to be both resilient and successful.”

Trade figures suggest that 90 percent of the cruise traffic comes from the United States, which is also the major source of stayover traffic. Visitors from China are said to make up about one percent of the overall total in the Caribbean and Latin America.

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"But even a small increase of those China tourists to Latin America will have an outsized impact on the sector in the region, especially for places in the Caribbean that are disproportionately dependent on the sector for their livelihood," noted Theodore Ward, a partner with consultancy Novam Portam.

Industry players have been casting their minds on how to tap into the growing Chinese thirst for overseas travel, particularly since Beijing's 2017 Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean that cited tourism as a key area for cooperation.

"China will explore and issue more facilitation policies to promote two-way tourism and support the negotiation for more direct flights between aviation authorities of the two sides," the policy paper said.

That will take time. So some have already decided to push the envelope like the investors who are reportedly planning to build a 200-million-dollar China-themed center on a former sugar cane field in Puerto Rico with the aim of attracting Chinese tourists.

(Top Photo: A couple perform a folk dance on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean. /VCG Photo)