Caribbean cruise ship income is the world’s lowest, World Bank official says

WASHINGTON DC--The Caribbean earns less from cruise ships than any other part of the world and a new tax is needed to rebalance the books, a World Bank official has said.

Lilia Burunciuc, director for the Caribbean at the Washington DC-based World Bank, warned that the region’s tourism model was unsustainable and called for separate countries to band together to thrash out better deals.

“The Caribbean is the largest region for cruise ship tourism, but gets the least per passenger,” she said, adding, “This is because there is a race to the bottom, again, because the region is not acting as a region.

“We know that one cruise ship passenger brings 24 times less than one nature-based tourist. Twenty-four times less.”

She was speaking at the recent Wider Caribbean Regional Risk Conference, organised by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) and held in Barbados earlier this month.

The CCRIF was set up in 2007 by the World Bank to help pool the risk for Caribbean and Central American countries from natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

Burunciuc asked, “Why not introduce a Caribbean environmental tax for the Caribbean Sea which is the same for all countries and which all cruise ships will have to pay?”

She added that recent World Bank research had shown that cruise ship passengers backed a special tax.

“When we surveyed the tourists on whether they would be willing to pay more for preserving the environment, they predominantly said ‘yes’, if the money is indeed used transparently and is used for the intended purposes. So the tourists are willing to pay.”

Slowest growing

Burunciuc highlighted that tourism continued to grow in the Caribbean, but slower than the average around the world.

She said, “For the last 20 years, the Caribbean region has been the slowest growing region in the world, even compared to other small states.”

Burunciuc added that “the model of tourism that exists in the Caribbean has probably reached its limit and more new, different types of tourism are taking off [but] not taking off as fast in the Caribbean and something needs to be done about this”.

She emphasised she was not arguing against cruise ship tourism, which remained a major pillar of the regional economy.

“I think it’s an important tourism segment, which will continue to be very important in the Caribbean,” she said. “But countries can actually get together and try to negotiate better results for themselves from cruise ship tourism.”

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