Fiji’s tourism numbers grew by four per cent in 2019 (894,389 visitors) to 929,740 visitors towards the end of 2023.
Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association CEO Fantasha Lockington highlighted this during the Fiji National University’s inaugural National Hospitality Conference in Nadi yesterday.
“Tourism takes care of a little over 30 per cent of employment in Fiji,” she said.
“Whether it be in the hotel industry, ferry service, in the airline or you might indirectly be in the tourism industry because your business exists as a result of tourism.”
Ms Lockington said COVID-19 “did a lot of things” but it also reinforced the industry’s resilience.
“Fiji dealt with a lot of things, whether it be the coups or cyclones. We dealt with all sorts of things but we never dealt with a medical situation that we neither had control of nor understanding of anything in our history to draw from.
“When the industry came to halt in 2019, suddenly $3.03billion worth of revenue stopped coming into Fiji.”
Ms Lockington said up until the pandemic, the industry was experiencing steady growth and when it hit, “we were thinking what we could do to get back up again”.
“To get your marketing return on investment, you need to know your consumer preferences and we want people to not only come back, but to feel safe and come back in more numbers than in 2019 and also stay long and spend more.”
Ms Lockington said Fiji was a brand in itself “and we wanted to be competitive with other destinations when we finally did open”.
“We opened in December 2021 and were tracking really well as we had a little over 600,000 visitors, bringing a little over $2billion.
“In 2023, we managed to get the revenue to $3.5billion.”
