Over 216K recorded in visitor arrivals for FY2022

The Guam Visitors Bureau (GVB) has announced that arrivals for Fiscal Year 2022 finished with 216,915 visitors welcomed to the island.

Guam recorded 28,028 visitors for the month of September 2022, up 388.7% from last year and 13% of 2019 visitor levels.

The latest preliminary arrival summary released by GVB’s research and strategic planning division notes that arrivals outperformed the Bureau’s original arrivals projection of 130,000 visitors for FY2022.

“We’re still on this long road to recovering our number one industry, but the strides we’re making with our airline partners, travel trade, and tourism-related businesses are getting us closer to our goals,” said GVB President & CEO Carl T.C. Gutierrez. “I thank Governor Lou Leon Guerrero and Lt. Governor Josh Tenorio for their support of tourism. They authorized us to use $6.5 million dollars in reimbursable American Rescue Plan funding to support three key initiatives: help visitors return home with our free COVID testing program with the Department of Public Health and Social Services, help our airline partners increase capacity through airline incentives, and help with upgrades and investments into our destination.”

“These successful programs, including Air V&V and our in-market campaigns, assisted in driving demand from our source markets to our island and continue to aid in our recovery efforts.”

FY2022 visitor arrivals have improved when compared to FY2021, but GVB is using 2019 as the true benchmark for recovery efforts. When looking at the market breakdown, arrivals show that 2% of Japan’s market recovered in FY2022, with Korea at 14.8%, Taiwan at 1.5%, China at 3.6%, US at 68.6%, the Philippines at 30.1%, and other markets at 31.2%.

Economic impact

GVB has completed its Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) economic impact reports for 2019-2021 in partnership with Tourism Economics. The TSA report is usually released every five years but was done annually between 2019 to 2021 because of the drastic shifts in tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report closely monitors and tracks the overall impact the visitor industry has on expenditures, government revenue, and the local workforce.

The new data shows that in 2019, visitor spending was at $1.8 billion dollars. It then took a sharp decline to $404 million in 2020 and finally reached its lowest level at $88 million in 2021 (-95.1%).

Taxes generated because of tourism were at $253 million in 2019, then decreased to $125 million in 2020, and subsequently to its lowest in 2021 at $57 million (-77.5%).

Tourism-related jobs grew to 23,100 in 2019. However, the number of jobs supported decreased by nearly half to 12,425 jobs (-46.2%) in 2021.

The total economic impact that tourism has had in Guam also changed dramatically. It generated $2.4 billion dollars in total sales in 2019, $776 million in 2020, and $306 million in 2021.

“The insights with the TSA reports are incredibly valuable in how we track tourism’s impact on our economy and community. We all anticipated the drop in tourism and now we can see the true impact across different sectors of the industry,” said Nico Fujikawa, GVB Director of Tourism Research and Strategic Planning. “Our outlook of the tourism’s recovery is slow but on track. We’re anticipating to recover around 33% of 2019 visitor levels or about 500,000 visitors in the coming year. It will be very interesting to see how spending habits and trends change in these reports as we collect new data.”

The TSA reports can be found here.

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