Cuba: Nearly 2.2 Million Tourist Arrivals in Six Months

Cuba’s travel industry has been growing strongly and steadily over the past six months. New figures released this week by the island nation’s Tourism Ministry show a staggering 17 percent increase from the first half of 2014, a condition that puts Cuba en route to reach way over 3 million sunbathers by the end of this year.

According to Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero, Canada, UK, Spain, Mexico, France and Italy continue to be the country’s top outbound markets, though the number of US visitors has also soared in the course of the ongoing year.

Due to the ever-growing demand for guestrooms in Havana, local tourism authorities have implemented a new development strategy that embraces more new builds and the refurbishment of exiting lodging facilities, Mr. Marrero was quoted as saying.

Figures released by Cuba’s National Statistics Office (ONEI is the Spanish acronym) indicate that Cuba welcomed 2,190,134 foreign visitors in the first half of 2015, up a whopping 17 percent growth from the same period of time last year.

In 2015, the island nation netted a little more than 3 million travelers from overseas (3,002,745), but this time around those numbers could get much higher. Some overstated estimates even point to an unprecedented 4-million-tourist mark by the end of 2015.

Cuba’s travel industry has reaped $1.7 billion in the first half of 2015 and authorities hope to tab as many as $2.7 billion by the end of December, according to official stats.

The American factor is one to take seriously into account in this forecast. Since US President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced the normalization of relations back in December 2014, American interest in visiting the neighboring island nation has been stepping up at a white-heat pace.

Even though open tourism for US citizens remains legally off limits, further relaxations on the travel ban have allowed for more American travel. President Obama has pledged to make far more cracks on the embargo walls before the end of his term in office, and there are pending legislations in Congress that could lift the travel ban on Cuba once and for all.

In the meantime, American airlines, hotel companies and cruise liners are mapping out their own strategies to jump on the Cuban market as soon as the remaining restrictions are jettisoned. If that happened before the year ends, Cuba could easily break that 4-million-tourist-arrival milestone and look well beyond the horizon line.