Is the Caribbean Ready for Every Traveler?

The numbers are impressive. The Caribbean welcomed 35 million visitors in 2025, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO)—once again surpassing pre-pandemic benchmarks and cementing the region’s status as one of the world’s most desired travel destinations. Sun, sea, and culture continue to draw travelers from every corner of the globe, and for many Caribbean economies, tourism remains the engine that drives everything else.

But here is the question that a growing number of industry insiders are now pressing: Is a record arrival figure the same thing as a truly welcoming destination?

For Roni Weiss, executive director of Travel Unity—a nonprofit dedicated to building a more diverse and inclusive travel industry—the answer is complicated. And at the CTO’s recently concluded Sustainable Tourism Conference in Belize, he made the case that the region can no longer afford to treat inclusivity as an afterthought.

The Modern Traveler Doesn’t Fit One Mold

The Caribbean has long marketed itself to a fairly traditional image of the tourist: a couple on a beach, cocktail in hand, unencumbered by complexity. But today’s traveler looks nothing like a monolith. They may have a physical disability. They may be a family traveling with a transgender child. They may be a same-sex couple, a solo traveler of color navigating safety concerns, or someone with dietary restrictions that make an all-inclusive buffet feel anything but inclusive.

Weiss draws on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to make his point—a framework that maps human motivation from basic survival to self-actualization. The analogy is apt: if a traveler cannot meet fundamental needs while on vacation, the higher pleasures of discovery, relaxation, and belonging become irrelevant.

“If we have dietary restrictions and we aren’t able to get the food we want, we’re not going to have a good experience,” Weiss told Guardian Media at the Belize conference. “If we don’t feel safe—and that could just be a general feeling of unsafeness, or that could be because of a specific aspect of our identity—if we feel like we don’t belong somewhere, we’re not welcome there, then why do we want to be there? And why would we return?”

It’s a straightforward logic, yet one that many Caribbean destinations have been slow to operationalize.

The Economics of Exclusion

Beyond the moral argument, there is an enormous financial case to be made. Data from the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) pegs the LGBTQ+ tourism market at over US$200 billion annually. That’s not a niche—it’s a major segment of global travel spending, and one that Caribbean destinations are leaving largely untapped due to restrictive laws or inhospitable social environments in several islands.

Weiss is careful not to cast the conversation purely in identity-politics terms. His argument is fundamentally about market reach. The United States and Canada remain the dominant source markets for Caribbean arrivals, and the demographic profile of North American travelers has shifted significantly in recent years. Awareness of—and sensitivity to—LGBTQ+ identities is now mainstream, particularly among parents.

“I think that’s a really important thing to understand about a big subset of American travelers—they’re aware of those identities, especially if they’re a parent. They’re going to be even more concerned about making sure that their kids feel safe and good about those travels,” Weiss explained.

The service doesn’t need to be complicated, he adds. It simply needs to be consistent and respectful. “If you have a same-sex couple coming in and checking in, and you have a heterosexual couple coming in, you’ve got to treat them the same way. You go: how many beds would you like? That’s not complicated. It just needs to be: how are we actually treating people within the lived situations?”

Curaçao: A Blueprint for Inclusive Growth

If there is a Caribbean island that has already embraced this philosophy—and profited from it—it may be Curaçao. The Dutch-affiliated island recorded a nine percent increase in visitor arrivals in 2025 compared to the prior year, welcoming approximately 1.7 million visitors in total.

André Rojer, Director of Product at the Curaçao Tourist Board, credits a significant portion of that success to a Dutch cultural framework that has long prioritized openness. The Netherlands has been a global frontrunner in LGBTQ+ rights and social inclusion for decades, and that ethos has extended to how Curaçao positions itself as a destination.

“They are the frontrunners of inclusivity and are absolutely welcoming to LGBT travelers,” Rojer said. “They don’t raise an eyebrow about that at all. It has been embraced right away—packages, tour operators, travel agents, influencers coming in.”

Beyond LGBTQ+ inclusivity, Rojer described a systematic approach to accessibility for travelers with physical disabilities. The tourist board conducted a full audit of properties across the island, cataloging which hotels have adapted rooms and identifying gaps across parks, recreational facilities, and tour operators.

“We did a full scan of all properties on the island and made sure that they have all of the physically challenged adaptations needed, how many rooms per hotel are adapted,” he said. “We even went further to parks, recreational places, and tours. Those are the small elements that are important.”

It’s the kind of structural approach—methodical, property-by-property—that few Caribbean destinations have yet adopted at scale.

Saint-Martin: Progress, and Honest Admission of Gaps

The French-Dutch island of Saint-Martin is another destination taking measured steps forward. Grégoire Dumel, local and regional manager at the Saint-Martin Tourist Board, pointed to the island’s building code as one mechanism already embedding accessibility into the tourism infrastructure—a proportion of all hotel ground-floor units must be designed to accommodate guests with disabilities.

Saint-Martin also hosts over two million cruise visitors annually, a segment of travelers whose medical needs require real logistical consideration. Dialysis is one example: for passengers who cannot interrupt their treatment schedules, the island has developed the capacity to provide the service while ships are in port.

“They can’t do it on the ship. So they will come down, and they will do it in Saint-Martin, for three to four hours, and then go back to the ship,” Dumel explained. It’s a specific, practical accommodation that speaks to the kind of creative problem-solving that inclusive tourism demands.

But Dumel is candid about how much further there is to go. “I think as a tourism authority, there’s much more that we can do to make sure that those visitors or tourists are as welcome as an able-bodied person.” The honesty is refreshing—and it signals a regional shift in how destinations are beginning to talk about this issue: less defensively, with greater accountability.

Inclusivity as a Tourism Strategy

Globally, the scale of the opportunity is significant. According to UN Tourism, approximately 1.3 billion people currently live with significant disabilities. And despite the barriers they face, travelers with disabilities are not sitting at home—a study by the Open Doors Organization found that disabled U.S. travelers spend nearly US$50 billion on travel annually. Factor in travel companions and caregivers, and that figure more than doubles to over US$100 billion per year.

Meanwhile, travel and tourism as a whole contributed US$11.6 trillion to global GDP in 2025, representing 9.8 percent of the world economy, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). The Caribbean’s slice of that depends not just on the beaches and the rum punches, but on whether every person who boards a plane to Nassau, Bridgetown, or Willemstad feels genuinely cared for when they arrive.

Weiss puts it plainly: “If you have any sort of economic interest in tourism, you want to make sure that people have a good experience, feel like people cared about them—because that’s how they return and tell other people that they should too.”

What Needs to Change—and Why Now

For travelers planning Caribbean getaways, the practical takeaway is already visible: some islands are moving faster than others. Curaçao, Aruba, and a handful of other Dutch-affiliated territories have built reputations as reliably welcoming to LGBTQ+ travelers, while several Eastern Caribbean nations still carry legal and social barriers that give diverse travelers legitimate reason for concern. Accessibility infrastructure—ramps, adapted rooms, medical service availability—varies enormously island to island.

The CTO’s Sustainable Tourism Conference was a signal that the conversation is entering a new phase. Sustainability, in the fullest sense of the word, can no longer mean only ecological stewardship; it must also mean building a tourism ecosystem that sustains all kinds of travelers.

The Caribbean has the warmth, the beauty, and the cultural richness to be the world’s most welcoming region. Getting there, though, will require more than a record arrival statistic. It will require asking—and honestly answering—the question Roni Weiss has been putting to destinations up and down the archipelago: Did every one of those 35 million visitors truly feel welcome?

For some, the answer is already yes. For far too many others, the work is only beginning.

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