Turks and Caicos Tourism and Visitor Statistics

The Turks and Caicos Islands is entirely reliant on tourism, which forms the largest part of the local economy. The United States represents approximately 81% of the source market for visitors, with Canada in second place at around 7%.

Between 1996 and 2019 (recent data is skewed due to the COVID-19 pandemic), total annual visitor growth averaged 17.3% (overnight visitor growth averaged 8.6%).

The pandemic caused overnight visitor arrivals to drop by 58% in 2020. Total visitor arrivals did not return to 2019 levels until 2023 (when they surpassed 2019 levels by approximately 3,000 visitors).

History of Tourism

Tourism in the Turks and Caicos Islands began with the Government’s strategy to adopt tourism as an industry, and the creation of the Tourist Board, in 1970. Initial growth was slow due to a variety of factors, such as lack of hospitality establishments and little airlift.

The opening of Club Med Turkoise and the development of the Providenciales International Airport in the mid-1980s started to change this. A big boost came with the introduction of the Miami–Providenciales American Airlines flight in December 1992, which made the islands far more accessible from the United States (which has always been the primary source market for tourism).

Cruise Visitors

The opening of the Grand Turk Cruise Center in 2006 launched the cruise tourism industry in the Turks and Caicos Islands. In 2006, cruise arrivals were 294,617, which rose to 939,028 in 2023. In 2018, the islands briefly achieved more than a million cruise visitors when there were 1,021,741 cruise arrivals.