SHTA says CBCS tourism export figures are overreported by XCG 800 Million

GREAT BAY--The St. Maarten Hospitality & Trade Association (SHTA) on Wednesday questioned the accuracy of tourism expenditure figures reported by the Central Bank of Curaçao and St. Maarten (CBCS). According to SHTA, the Central Bank’s quarterly balance of payments data, which lists “travel exports,” is overreported by approximately XCG 800 million compared to survey-based and occupancy-driven calculations.

“This amounts to roughly XCG 18,000 per resident, representing a level of economic production that is simply not occurring,” the association stated. “If that 800 million is not actually produced, it means fewer jobs, lower income, less funding for investments, reduced tax intake, and weaker social security contributions. In short, it means a lot less economic activity for Sint Maarten.”

The SHTA’s analysis draws from multiple independent data sources, including country budget figures, TES (Tourism Expenditure Survey) reports, and occupancy rates. These show that visitors spend 55 to 60 percent of their budgets on accommodations, allowing for expenditure to be calculated from accommodation revenues. When applying these methods, the association found that CBCS’s reported travel export numbers far exceed what the underlying data supports.

The SHTA emphasized the importance of reliable statistics for economic planning: “The private sector relies on authorities to produce accurate and timely statistics. It is impossible to run a company if you don’t know what your revenue is; the same counts on a country level. With the current large differences in economic output statistics, it is seemingly impossible to design befitting economic policies like tax and social security reform.”

𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫:

Tourism exports are not physical goods like cars or electronics, but rather the money that foreign visitors spend in a country.

In Sint Maarten’s case, every time a tourist books a hotel, eats at a restaurant, buys souvenirs, or pays for a boat trip, that spending counts as a form of “export” because it brings foreign income into the local economy. Even though the visitor never takes a product back home, the money they spend flows into Sint Maarten the same way foreign currency does when a country exports goods.

So in economic terms:

• Tourism exports = spending by non-residents in the local economy.

• They include accommodations, food and beverages, transportation, entertainment, shopping, and other tourism services.

• They are critical for small island economies like Sint Maarten, where tourism is the main “export industry.”

That’s why accurate reporting of tourism exports is so important: they are a key measure of how much foreign income is truly entering the country and sustaining jobs, businesses, government revenue, and social programs.