Continuous growth in tourism

The tourism sector continues to go from strength to strength with the visitor arrivals tracking just above 2019 pace – 12 months ahead of schedule, says Tourism Fiji chief executive Brent Hill.

He said this had led the Reserve Bank of Fiji to upgrade their growth targets for Fiji to 18.6 per cent for 2022 and now forecasting the economy to grow by 8 per cent in 2023.

According to Mr Hill the by-product of these strong tourism numbers is increased interest in investment – with a strong pipeline of projects, upgrades, sales and partnerships underway.

“Great for our construction industry and retention of skilled labour in Fiji,” he said.

In a media release recently the RBF said visitor arrivals had increased steadily since the re-opening of borders and were on track to returning to prepandemic levels.

According to the RBF in the first four months of 2023 visitor arrivals totalled 252,245 visitors, slightly higher than the arrivals recorded in the same period in 2019.

It said this outcome was driven mainly by higher arrivals from our traditional source markets of Australia, New Zealand and North America contributing 82.5 per cent to total visitor arrivals.

The bank shared industry feedback which revealed that the average hotel occupancy rate and revenue earned from rooms sold had outpaced pre-pandemic levels.

Recent provisional visitors numbers released by the Fiji Bureau of Statistics show that 76,961 visitors arrived in the country in April – an increase of 27.1 per cent compared with March this year, which recorded 60,548 arrivals.

In 2022 and 2021, visitor arrivals for April stood at 46,680 and 813 respectively.

The countries that accounted for 91.3 per cent of the total visitor arrivals for April include Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Europe, China and Great Britain.