Why the US Virgin Islands Is a “Leader” in Caribbean Tourism 

It’s not just all the new flights, or the hotel occupancy growth, or the new-look waterfront in Charlotte Amalie. 

There’s a palpable dynamism in the US Virgin Islands right now. You know it when you board a completely-full flight from Miami to St Thomas in the middle of July. 

And you certainly saw it this past week at the inaugural US Virgin Islands Tourism Summit, a high-level conference on local and regional tourism that was the perfect example of why this destination is performing so strongly right now. 

“We continue to be a leader in regional tourism,” said US Virgin Islands Tourism Commissioner Joseph Boschulte, who organized the summit along with USVI Governor Albert Bryan, Jr at the Westin Beach Resort in St Thomas.

While Caribbean destinations frequently have local hotel association meetings, this was something different: an in-depth look at the state of tourism and the broader regional industry, with the public sector right alongside the private sector. The kind of conference you sometimes see at the regional level — but almost never in a single Caribbean destination. 

It was a model for the region, aimed at pushing the envelope further for an industry that by all objective measures is already performing right at the top of the regional standard. 

And the reality is that, particularly since the heart of the pandemic, US Virgin Islands tourism is doing well. Very well. 

Thanks to a tourism renaissance that began with an expertly-managed, health-sensitive reopening, the destination is seeing the best numbers it has ever seen. 

This year, the USVI is expected to see a 24 percent increase in airlift arrivals, compared to 2023. 

The first quarter of 2024 saw a 26.5 percent jump over Q1 in 2023, Boschulte said. 

That number was a 63 percent increase over the first quarter of 2019. 

As was noted during the summit, for years the USVI’s wheelhouse was not stayover tourism. It was cruise. But when the pandemic shut down cruise traffic, the destination quickly shifted its focus to stayover growth, and that’s helped lead to the territory’s new tourism boom. 

Of course, cruise tourism has come back in earnest, particularly in St Croix, which is a relatively new cruise destination — with a 77 percent increase in arrivals projected this year. 

“We continue to see rise ship arrivals go up,” Boschulte said. 

The summit covered everything from a look at the broader Caribbean market to a dialogue on improving the tourism product to more dialed-in sessions on everything from local business SEO to visitor booking patterns. 

“We are doing really well, but there is still a lot of work to be done to maximize tourism,” Bryan, Jr. said. “But how do we maximize tourism? How do we make sure that we are getting the best of every tourist that comes here, and that they’re seeing the best of us?”