The average expense per person and per day of travel was $190. Travelers spent an average of 6.3 nights on the Island
Since the beginning of 2022, Discover Puerto Rico has been creating a profile of visitors to the island through personal interviews during their stays. The intention is to create a more complete and functional study on the profile of the visitor to Puerto Rico, the first completed in more than five years. This study would be used to guide the marketing decisions through the understanding of the motivations of the visitors for the creative production and the location in the average data of the attributes of the trip, such as the composition of the travel group, the duration of the stay and the travel expense.
For those interviewed during the first half of the year, the average cost per person per day of travel was $190. Given that visitors spend an average of 6.3 nights on Isla, this translates into an average group travel expense of $2,870. The study of the visitor's profile allows you to evaluate the expense by reason of travel as well as by type of accommodation. Business visitors and conventions are those who have the highest spending per person, with $284 for each day of travel, which is 50% more than the average.
If business and conventions will represent only 5% of travelers in the first six months of 2022, it continues to be an important segment due to average expenses recorded. In an August 2022 report, the media specialized in the tourism industry, Skift, reported that business travelers are not expected to recover to levels prior to the pandemic until 2026.
The meetings and conventions are just a part of the business travel segment that provides a point of reference for the general performance of Puerto Rico in relation to competition with other destinations in the United States. Currently, the Asociación de Viajes de EE. UU. maintain group booking data from more than 250 destination market organizations. At the national level, in just three months in the last four quarters of these destinations, we have seen an increase in the reservations of group housing compared to the levels prior to the pandemic.
In contrast to this, Discover Puerto Rico's sales team has seen increases in group housing reservations in six months, ending the fiscal year with a 75% increase in group reservations for June 2022 compared to Same month in 2019. In total, Discover Puerto Rico reserved 35% more nights of group housing in the last fiscal year in comparison with the same period in 2018-19.
Before the pandemic, the cruise segment represented 33% of visitors to the island's residents in 2019. Due to the delay in recovering from the cruise segment, these excursionists represented only 9% of visitors in 2021. While the spending of non-residents on the Island in 2021 has increased by 11% since 2019, with visitors from cruceros, the total volume of non-residents has remained at 13% because of the levels prior to the pandemic.
In its latest forecast, Tourism Economics expects the Caribbean to capture almost 50% of its operating capacity in 2019 by the end of the year, with 76% more days of regional cruises in December 2022 compared to 2022.
San Juan will experience a large capacity increase in the fourth quarter. With this, Tourism Economics anticipates that the port will recover 46% of the volume of passengers from 2019 to the end of 2022. Given the current itineraries and the possibility that these will increase, San Juan is expected to have 79% of the volume of cruises from 2019 in 2023.
Brand USA, the official destination marketing organization for the states and territories of EE. UU., and the research firm Iolite, have recently completed a study that evaluates the impact of culture on travel advertising. Al question to travelers from EE. UU., Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom and China, the study focuses on motivations to travel, travel expenses and the impact of advertising campaigns centered on iconic images against a combination of iconic and multicultural images for various destinations.
The report finds that international travelers enjoy a combination of activities when they travel and are motivated to travel to de-stress and relax, fulfill an old desire to visit a particular place or connect with nature and free air. The study found that there is a multicultural multiplier to use multicultural images to compare travel expenses per person per night in mature markets. For example, American cultural travelers expect to spend an average of 36% more and Canadian travelers 46% more than other types of travellers. In emerging markets, the differential in the spending rate is lower due mainly to the cost of some iconic experiences.
The study confirms Discover Puerto Rico's research that local culture is positioned as a motivation for travel, the essence of the Live Boricua campaign