Tourist arrivals figure so far is 689,142 and of this, 90,439 is for the month of September alone, further highlighting the industry’s resilience and quick adaption to new practices, says Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association (FHTA) CEO Fantasha Lockington .
While appearing on the The Fiji Times online news portal, The Lens@177, Ms Lockington shared insights on the post-Covid 19 recovery in the tourism industry.
“For September last month we brought in 90,439 visitors and if you consider 2019, which is the year that we always benchmark against because it was the highest tourism industry performance, the September 2019 arrivals was at 81,354,” she said. “So definitely a huge increase in what we were doing as opposed to pre Covid.”
She said Fiji’s tourism industry experienced a significant increase in arrivals and earnings post-COVID-19, and stock markets in Australia, New Zealand and USA increasing.
“Australia for instance is up 47 per cent, New Zealand is 27 per cent and from USA we bring in around 9 per cent and then the other countries at slightly smaller figures.
“But you put this up against the information that the national airline Fiji Airways is doing a lot more frequencies, they’ve got a bigger lift now with two bigger aircraft, so obviously your numbers into those countries, in terms of your seat capacity is going to be lifted quite considerably.”
Ms Lockington said they were pleased with the numbers. “So we’re tracking really good, so far, the estimated earnings is a little over $2 billion.
“If you consider in 2022, our total visitor arrivals was 636,000. So we’ve already beaten that number just after September, and we brought in around $2 billion in 2022.
“In 2019 with 894,389 visitors, the industry brought in $3 billion.”
Ms Lockington said the hotel industry in Fiji continued to face challenges with staff turnover and rising costs ecause of the increasing demand from overseas visitors.
Ms Lockington noted the long duration of COVID-19 and the challenges of re-opening, despite months of preparations.
She said despite this, there was a surge in bookings although there wereinitial predictions of a decline, adding that research showed people’s desire to travel increased when they were restricted which led to a bounce-back effect.
“So far this year, there have been 689,142 arrivals, which is about 77 per cent of the total number of arrivals for 2019.”
