2020 had already started slow. Central Bank statistics for air arrivals for January and February 2020 were 1,122,410, 6.7% less than for the same period in 2019. Travelers feared Covid-19 could disrupt their trip and many canceled early on. The Dominican Republic was still recovering from the fake news media storm that wrongly blamed Dominican hotels for the deaths of US citizens.
This compares to the statistics for the past three years:
2018: 1,239,411
2019: 1,319,337
2020: 1,236,031
And then things just got worse than anyone would have imagined. The first case of Covid-19 in the Dominican Republic was reported on 1 March. By 20 March, air, sea and land borders were closed to commercial traffic The Central Bank statistics tell the rest of the story.
The total of air arrivals for January-April was of 1,533,692. This is an inter-annual variation of -42.6% or 1,136,993 fewer tourists than for the same period in 2019.
Overall travel for the first four months of the year (January-April) was 1,392,676 non-resident visitors, 1,067,747 fewer travelers, or a pronounced drop of 43.4% compared to the same four months in 2019. Even the number of faithful Dominican expats that visited was down 32.7% compared to last year.
The numbers for March are 270,049 visitors, a decline of 402,920 people, or 60% compared to March 2019. The March number is 62% less foreign non-resident air arrivals and 43.8% less Dominican non-resident arrivals.
For April, the Central Bank statistics show only 217 visitors air arrivals. Of this, 115 were non-resident Dominicans and 102 non-resident foreigners.
59% of the foreign non-resident arrivals came from North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), 26.2% from Europe, 11.6% from South America, 2.8% from the Caribbean and Central America and 0.4% from the rest of the world.