The Aruba Tourism Authority publishes its 2021 Tourism Recovery Marketing Plan.

The plan is divided into five sections:

• A description of the evolution of Aruba’s tourism sector with reference to past crises.
• A set of Tourism Recovery Scenarios for both 2020 and 2021.
• The proposed strategic direction for 2021.
• A marketing and promotional plan for 2021.
• A destination development plan focusing on servicing a high value, low impact tourism growth model.

The ATA offers three scenarios for the volume of stopover arrivals for calendar year 2020.

Aruba received 1,118,944 stopovers in 2019.

• Optimistic – 434,000 stopovers, down 61% compared to 2019.
• Conservative – 374,000 stopovers, down 67% compared to 2019.
• Worst-case – 224,000 stopovers, down 80% compared with 2019.

Through the end of September 2020 Aruba has seen the volume of stopovers fall by 68% compared with the first nine months of 2019. The ATA then offers three scenarios for stopover traffic for calendar year 2021.

• Optimistic – 658,184 stopovers, down 41% compared to 2019.
• Cautiously Optimistic – 611,555 stopovers, down 45% compared to 2019.
• Conservative – 515,190 stopovers, down 54% compared to 2019.

The core of the plan is to target the North American market which is projected to comprise 87% of all stopover arrivals in 2021. The ATA indicates that its recovery goals for 2021 are:

• Recover stopover visitor arrivals to between 45% – 60% when compared to 2019.
• Recover tourism credits (expenditures) to between 45% and 60% when compared to 2019.
• Recover the average daily room rates of the commercial accommodation sector to 75% of the rates achieved in 2019.
• Recover cruise visitor arrivals to between 45% – 67% when compared to 2019.

In 2019 Aruba received 832,001 cruise visitors. The ATA’s funding is derived from the hotel room tax and from a levy on arriving air passengers. With the dramatic decline in both air arrivals and hotel stays seen in 2020 the ATA’s income is, and will continue to be, substantially less than it received in 2019. Consequently, the ATA states that the successful implementation of its 2021 marketing plan is contingent upon additional funds being provided to the ATA for marketing purposes and further states that with the additional funding, the North American market is projected to recover by60% when compared to 2019 visitor arrivals. However, without the funding, the recovery would only reach a recovery of 51% of the total achieved by North America in 2019.

Equally, in the event additional funding is not made available for 2021, the budgets for the Latin American and the European markets will be further reduced to a bare minimum, so as to safeguard funding for North America, and for airlift endeavors.

Source: tourismanalytics.com