Cuba Ranks High among Canadians’ Traveling Preferences
May 06, 07 | 11:22 pm
Canada -the guest country is this year’s 25th edition of the International Tourism Fair- has been leading the traveling pack among Cuba’s outbound markets since the late 1990s. Canadian trippers find in Cuba a good option for their vacations, chiefly due to great weather conditions, tourist offers and other hard-to-find commodities, like safety, culture and natural allures.
Over the past decade, Canada held on tight to the top spot among Cuba’s outbound markets for six years in a row. In 1998, it recouped the leading notch following Italy’s back-to-back chart-topping performances in 1996 and 1997. By 1990, as many as 74,435 Canadian tourists had visited Cuba, a figure that soared to 142,000 in 1995 and a staggering 215,644 in 1998.
In 2003, Canada scooped up nearly a fifth of all of Cuba’s tourists and remained on the top of that list with 452,438 sunbathers in all. Last year, the North American nation ?together with Italy, Germany, France, Spain, UK and Mexico- accounted for two thirds of the total amount of foreign visitors to the island nation.
Stepped-up airlift with nonstop flights that hook up Havana and Santiago de Cuba with such major Canadian cities as Montreal and Toronto, as well as the Quebec region, is bringing a far larger tourist inflow from that country to Cuba.
Little more than 600,000 Canadians visited Cuba last year. In the ongoing period, this market promises to put more good numbers on the board. By the end of the first quarter of 2007, the Canadian market has hiked 1.6 percent from the year before.
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