The Caribbean is the most popular cruise destination in the world with more visitors arriving by cruise ship than anywhere else in the world.
AAA is projecting that nearly 19 million Americans will take a cruise in 2025, with many of them headed to the Caribbean.
The most popular destination for cruisers is The Bahamas, with over eight million people arriving there last year via a cruise ship. This shouldn’t come at a surprise since most cruise lines have private islands there and are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading them.
The Bahamas should continue to grow since Carnival Cruise Line is opening a new port (Celebration Key) there this summer and it will eventually be able to accommodate four ships every day.
Mexico came in second last year with just over 4.1 million cruise visits. The Dominican Republic, U.S. Virgin Islands and Turks & Caicos round out the top five.
While some ports/countries in the Caribbean/Bahamas are seeing more cruise visitors that ever before, a few ports are seeing a decline in visits.
The Caribbean port that’s been hit the hardest by a decline in visits is Grand Cayman. In 2019, 1,831,011 people arrived to the Cayman Islands via a cruise ship. In 2024, that number had dropped to just 1,076,875, a 41.2% decline.
Two of the three largest drops in visits over the past five years are both tender ports, Belize and Grand Cayman.
A debate has gone on for years in Grand Cayman about the ports need to build a pier or berthing facilities to eliminate the need for tenders.
Cruise lines are building more mega ships than ever before and cruise ships over 160,000 gross tons in size rarely tender due to the amount of passengers on the ship. The ships need a pier to handle the flow of traffic getting off and getting back on the vessel.
Tourismanalytics.com created the following infographic showing which destinations in the Caribbean have had the biggest increases and decreases in visits from 2019 until 2024.
On April 30, 2025, a referendum and general election will be held in the Cayman Islands.
The Association for Cruise Tourism in the Cayman Islands (ACT) is pushing back against what it calls false and misleading claims by CPR Cayman and other anti-cruise tourism groups.
Will Grand Cayman ever build a pier? Only time will tell on that one. One thing is for sure, most cruise passengers prefer a pier over tendering as it’s much more convenient.
Also, ports that require tendering are more likely to get canceled due to weather and unsafe conditions.
