by Brian Major
Last updated: 12:25 PM ET, Fri March 8, 2024
The World
Tourism Organization (UNWTO) this week identified the Turks and Caicos Islands
as the best-performing global destination in 2023, recognizing a post-pandemic tourism
surge during which the archipelago’s arrivals increased 127 percent.
The Turks and Caicos outpaced all other international
destinations in terms of visitor growth since 2019 last year, according to
UNWTO’s World Tourism Barometer.
The country outpaced
nations including Qatar (in second place, up 90 percent) and Saudi Arabia (third
at 56 percent).
The Turks
and Caicos was followed by several Caribbean destinations within the UNWTO’s 10
nations with the largest post-pandemic arrivals growth, including Curaçao and the
Dominican Republic (tied for ninth at 24 percent each) and the U.S. Virgin
Islands (tenth at 23 percent).
The Turks
and Caicos Islands re-opened from its pandemic shutdown on July 22, 2020 with “a
stringent entry protocols including a vaccination requirement,” said government
officials in a statement.
Officials
subsequently implemented a strategy to “attract a high-income, luxury niche
market rather than a high-volume mass market” and adopted “a more intentional
approach to managing the tourism sector” with the establishment of destination management organization Experience Turks and
Caicos in 2023.
“Tourism is
our main economic driver,” said Josephine Connolly, the Turks and Caicos
minister of tourism, “and as such, it was imperative that we got the sector up
and running as early as possible but in a carefully managed and strategic way. “
The
government has additionally launched a “Tourism Carrying Capacity Study” designed
to “guide the government’s policies for the sustainable development of the
tourism industry” via “analysis of the environmental, economic, social and
cultural impacts of the sector.”
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