Post-Cyclone Matthew Needs Assessment: Tourism Sector

The tourism volume of the post-Matthew needs assessment, prepared by the Ministry of Tourism and published unedited. Its opening judgment is that nationally the sector was lightly affected and most of the offer stayed operational, and the rest of the volume shows how little that tells you about the affected areas.

Before the storm the sector had four sub-sectors, accommodation, catering, excursions and crafts, worth 10.73 million US dollars in turnover across Sud, Grand'Anse, Nippes and Nord-Ouest and supporting 3,435 jobs, of which Sud alone accounted for 8.93 million and 2,859 jobs. In 2015 Haiti received 515,804 stay-over tourists, up 10.9 percent, and 673,501 cruise passengers at Labadie, with tourism contributing 4.2 percent of GDP on IHSI figures. Damage is set at 14.8 million dollars, 12.8 million of it private, and losses at 3.8 million over one year, driven by the fall in visitors rather than by destroyed assets. Close to 300 small and medium enterprises in the far South lost infrastructure, and the share of hotel rooms wholly or partly destroyed reached 95 percent at Roche-a-Bateau, 77 percent at Camp Perrin, 61 percent at Port-Salut and 53 percent at Les Cayes. Public assets were hit too: the Cayes hotel training school, the Marie-Jeanne cave visitor center and Port-Salut beach.

Total recovery needs come to 77,243,000 dollars, and the ministry puts job losses in the sector at about 95 percent, noting that women are the majority of the workforce. The volume is candid about its own limits: there are no comprehensive turnover data, so losses could only be estimated, and figures for Grand'Anse, Nippes and Nord-Ouest are assumptions built from expert opinion on the Sud pattern.