NEW YORK - The Caribbean is the world’s most tourism-intensive region. It’s also one of the most analyzed: island marketers are awash in statistics for the quantity of visits, attractions and spending in Caribbean countries. But measures comparing the relative quality of the tourism experience from one country to the next – from a visitors’ point of view – are quasi-nonexistent.
Resonance Consultancy’s new Caribbean Tourism Quality Index benchmarks the quality of tourism in the Caribbean by using the ratings and reviews of experiences published by travelers themselves in social media channels, combined with core statistics for factors such as crime and flight access.
“We’ve learned that traditional measures of success – numbers of visitors and the spending they generate – don’t tell destination marketing and management organizations the whole story,” says Chris Fair, president of Resonance Consultancy. “Looking at destinations through a supply-side lens helps destinations better understand their strengths from their visitors’ perspective, and identifies areas for improvement based on benchmarking against their competitors.”
The report ranks Caribbean destinations in 12 areas, including hotels, attractions and amusements, food experiences, culture and performing arts, and shopping, to name a few.
The study offers both Absolute and Indexed rankings: The former ranks countries according to the total number of quality tourism products and experiences, and the latter indexes the findings against each destination’s visitor count to identify which destinations offer the most quality product and experiences per visitor.
The top 5 Caribbean countries with the most very good and excellent total tourism products and experiences are:
1. Dominican Republic
2. Puerto Rico
3. Cuba
4. Jamaica
Bahamas
The top 5 Caribbean destinations with the most quality tourism products and experiences per visitor are:
1.Turks and Caicos
2. Barbados
3. Trinidad & Tobago
4. Martinique
5. Anguilla.
