The Competitiveness Of Selected Caribbean Tourism Markets

摘要

This paper reviews the competitiveness of the largest Caribbean tourism destinations, defined as their shares in the overseas travel markets of the US, the UK and Canada. Caribbean destinations maintained their market share in North America, their most important market, in the 1980 - 2004 period, but their share of the UK market declined. We test for elasticities with respect to destinations' tourism prices, competitors' prices, travel costs and GDP growth in originating countries. For Caribbean countries as a whole, the pace of income growth in tourists' countries of origin has a much greater impact on their market share than do their own or competitors' prices, but there is a great diversity of experience at the individual country level.