Commonwealth suggests its first global tourism action plan

Friday, July 2, 2021

The major drop in global tourism due to the pandemic is having an extensive and overwhelming impact, mainly for Small States. During a Commonwealth Tourism Seminar organized yesterday, the Commonwealth Secretariat has suggested for the development of a global ‘Tourism Action Plan’. This would help in boosting the much-needed recovery of the sector.

For many Commonwealth Small States, tourism is the financial lifeblood, particularly in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) where almost 90% of tourism comes from international tourists.

While delivering a speech at the event, the Hon Allen Chastanet Prime Minister of St Lucia explained the local impact:
“This crisis has given us the perfect economic lab to examine the impact of tourism because we have lost it for 18 months. In St Lucia, we’ve had a 20% contraction in our economy, 90% of that was because of the inaccessibility of tourism. Our debt stock increased by 10% and our economy contracted by 20%. We now know given the fallout that the economic impact of tourism in our own destinations is very far-reaching and creates opportunities that maybe were not taken advantage of in better days.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, as per the UN, there were over 1 billion fewer tourism arrivals globally, creating a loss of over $4 trillion to the global GDP for the years 2020 and 2021 respectively.

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