Visitor numbers are recovering but not at pre-pandemic levels
STAYING visitor numbers are recovering but are still not at the level they were before the Covid pandemic, Economic Development president Neil Inder told States members yesterday.
As part of the committee’s general update statement, Deputy Inder said that travel habits had changed and cost-of-living pressures were still affecting disposable incomes, adding that the twin issues revolving around the island’s sea and air carriers had not helped the recovery.
The latest figures show that there were just over 58,000 staying visitors in Guernsey during the second quarter of this year, an increase of 9% compared with the same quarter in 2023.
However, this was still 14% below the second quarter of 2019 before the pandemic.
Deputy Inder said his committee had budgeted to invest £1.6m. in marketing the island as a visitor destination in 2024.
However, he said that the committee had made a pitch to Policy & Resources to uplift that budget, adding it was ‘under the cosh’ and ‘scraping around for the last bean’.
‘I’m not entirely sure we have enough in our marketing budget to do everything we want,’ he said.
‘Because we focus on that core churn of people, trying to get them into hotels, we do not have a lot of capacity to look at more sectorised things.’
He added that he believed the tourism budget should be doubled.
When asked by Deputy Adrian Gabriel whether he would be providing an update on the potential introduction of a ‘visitors tax’ – a revenue-generating nightly levy aimed at tourists – Deputy Inder said his committee had done some work on it and had instructed an officer to look at the details. However, he said that, personally, he was not a fan of the idea.
He warned that there was a price point on all travel, and feared that chasing a budgeted figure would end up affecting a tourism sector that was still in recovery.
