The government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines is forecasting continued record-breaking stay-over arrivals for the second quarter of 2025, buoyed by strong hotel occupancy and airline bookings during the carnival season.
“I’m happy to report that the same period this year, almost every major hotel in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is at 100 per cent occupancy for the carnival season,” Tourism Minister Carlos James told a news conference. He noted that around this time last year, in the lead-up to the Cricket World Cup, hotels were operating at 75 to 80 percent capacity.
James added that airlines have reported “very positive preseason bookings ahead of the Vincymas period … and, of course, one airline has signalled the intention to add additional seats to the destination during that period.”
According to figures from the Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), St. Vincent and the Grenadines welcomed a record 102,766 stay-over visitors in 2024 — a 27.2% increase compared to the previous year.
James said performance indicators for the first quarter of 2025 showed a 12.8% increase over the same period in 2024.
“So, we’re now 12.8 per cent up. There’s an uptick, and our local numbers are showing 2.9 per cent, but the CTO numbers ranked us at 2.8 per cent. There’s some variance there, but by and large, we are seeing an uptick in our first quarter performance,” he said.
The CTO data also indicated strong growth from the U.S. source market. Eleven reporting destinations saw increases in U.S. visitors, with 13 destinations surpassing their 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
“In terms of the arrivals from the US source market for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, we saw the strongest growth of 74.8 per cent, followed by Curacao at 23.5 per cent, Barbados at 22 per cent and Antigua at 12.4 per cent as the best performances attracting visitors from the United States in the first quarter of 2025,” James said.
He added that St. Vincent and the Grenadines showed “the strongest growth performance in the entire Caribbean region at 75 4.8 per cent” and was “the second-ranked best-performing Caribbean island with projected growth of 23.5 per cent.”
“You can see the distance in terms of where we performed, we outperformed many of the other Caribbean destinations as it relates to the visitors coming to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and to the Caribbean region from the US source market,” James said.
Out of 20 CTO destinations that reported statistics, 13 showed positive growth across all source markets. Curacao led with 16.6%, followed by St. Vincent and the Grenadines at 12.8%, Bermuda at 9.8%, and Dominica at 9.6%.
“The destination’s performance, of course, is reflective of the transformation that is taking place within our country’s tourism. And I want to indicate key drivers for growth, including our tourism infrastructure build-out, a greater collaboration, as I said earlier, with stakeholders,” James said.
“And no doubt, the International Airport at Argyle had a significant role to play in what we’re seeing now in our transformation as a globally-competitive tourism destination,” he added.
