Cruise visits drive new tourism record

A record number of tourists visited the Virgin Islands last year, but nearly three-fourths of them came off a cruise ship and stayed for less than a day.

The territory’s visitor total reached 1,202,008 in 2025 — up seven percent from the previous record set in 2016 — amid a boom driven by a 13.9 percent jump in cruise passengers as overnight arrivals continued to languish more than 25 percent below their 2016 high.

In a statement last Thursday in the House of Assembly, Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley said cruise arrivals — which made up nearly 73 percent of last year’s total compared to about 62 percent in 2016 — hit a record of 875,127 in 2025.

But the number of overnight visitors was at 302,828 — a 0.8 percent decrease from 2024 and nearly 26 percent shy of the record 407,764 who visited in 2016.

The numbers suggest that despite recent resort re-openings and government hype, the overnight sector is still struggling to recover from the twin disasters of Hurricane Irma in 2017 and the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020.

Premier’s comments

Last Thursday, Mr. Wheatley touted the 2025 records while playing down the overnight sector’s challenges.

“Cruise tourism continues to perform strongly while overnight tourism, though still rebuilding relative to historic peaks, shows clear momentum and growing confidence in what the Virgin Islands offers as a premium, experience-based destination,” he said. “This trajectory reinforces the soundness of our policy direction and provides a stable platform for continued investment, product enhancement and strategic growth within the tourism sector.”

Mr. Wheatley added that the overnight arrival numbers in 2025 showed “relative stability” in the sector, reflecting “continued traveller confidence in the Virgin Islands as a destination for longer stays and deeper engagement.”

The premier also said the 2025 numbers show that the territory’s “tourism recovery is both sustained and strategic.”

Policy and strategy

After listing the numbers, Mr. Wheatley gave an update on long-delayed efforts to create a National Tourism Policy and a National Tourism Strategy.

A draft of the policy, he said, “will shortly be published on the government’s website for public awareness and comment, providing residents, stakeholders and industry partners with the opportunity to review the draft policy and contribute meaningfully to shaping the future direction of the sector.”

The strategy, he added, will work in tandem with the policy.

“While the National Tourism Policy establishes the direction and intent of government, the National Tourism Strategy will serve as a primary implementation and delivery instrument,” he said.

To develop the strategy, he added, government is working on procuring a consultant after issuing a Nov. 6 request for proposals with a Dec. 22 deadline.

“A robust response has been received to the call for proposals for the consultancy to develop the National Tourism Strategy, with submissions currently under assessment in accordance with established procurement processes to ensure the effective delivery of the plan,” he said.

The chosen consultant, he added, will work closely with the government, industry stakeholders and communities to “produce a practical and implementable strategy that aligns with the national budget cycle, guides public and private investment decisions, and establishes clear mechanisms for monitoring performance and outcomes.”

He did not provide a target date for the completion or release of either document.

History of delays

The tourism-planning effort has been long delayed.

In 2011, the National Democratic Party came to power promising to replace an outdated tourism strategy adopted in the mid-1990s.

Until his retirement in 2019, then-premier Dr. Orlando Smith continued to push the idea, which was also included in the Recovery to Development Plan that government published shortly after Hurricane Irma devastated the territory in 2017.

“The first step to revisioning and repositioning the tourism industry for the future is the development of a national tourism strategy in 2018,” the recovery plan stated.

After that, however, multiple efforts to create the strategy stalled. In January 2024, Mr. Wheatley told the HOA that “consultations” had begun to inform a national tourism plan, which he said would be completed by the end of that year.

But that didn’t happen.

A year later, the VI hosted its first-ever tourism summit, where Mr. Wheatley said a policy set for completion in June 2025 would inform the creation of a plan he said would be completed around October 2025.

After setting those targets, the government hosted eight more public meetings across the territory from March 4 through April 17 in 2025, according to schedules published online.

But on April 23, the government cancelled six other meetings scheduled for April and May, including one in Road Town.

Government said at the time that these cancelled meetings were to be replaced by “target focus groups.”

Despite the June and October 2025 target dates, no plan, policy or strategy was circulated last year, and last October Mr. Wheatley said in a press conference that the new target date for the completion of the plan was “sometime in 2026.”