This pandemic has affected tourism enormously worldwide. According to the United World Tourism Organization, the continent of America, including the Caribbean, may see a recovery of 35% by the end of this year, of what was received last year. And in Asia, the recovery could reach 31%.
That the recovery percentage is not exactly where we want it to be, has to do with the fact that there is so much uncertainty, mostly financial. Hence, people think twice before traveling, but it also has to do with each country’s local situation.
In October, we received 61% more tourists than in September. Here, we can see how the number of cases affected the number of tourists who came to the island and how we recovered this back in October and hopefully the rest of the year.
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Now that the positive cases are under control, ATA has changed the restrictions regarding traveling to Aruba. One of the changes was reducing the mandatory insurance fee for those traveling to Aruba.
These changes make it easier to visit Aruba. The borders with South America will be opening as well. Wednesday, they announced that Aruba, in partnership with Jetblue and US laboratory De Vault will be offering all Jetblue passengers the possibility to take the mandatory COVID-19 test before traveling to Aruba.
This is significant because, in 2019, Jetblue brought 254.635 passengers to Aruba, 22.8% of all visitors, and is the airline that gets the most tourists to our island. Between July and October 2020, Jetblue carried 16.850 passengers to Aruba, 25.1% of the total visitors Aruba received.
As much as we want to increase tourists’ numbers, it is important to continue following all protocols because the COVID-19 situation changes rapidly.
The restrictions that remained for the visitors is to ensure that the spread of the coronavirus is minimized.
