Skift Take
No combination of cruise ships, Airbnb rentals, state-run hotels, or nuns' quarters will be enough to replace smart tourism development, which Cuba may not yet be capable of carrying out.
As Cuba's visitor numbers continue to soar the accommodation crisis in many parts of the island is acute.
Few new hotels are coming online and the tourism boom shows no signs of slowing down. Scheduled direct flights from the United States to the island begin with a JetBlue flight at the end of the month and more will launch this fall, bringing even more travelers to the island nation.
The stats tell the story. A total of 2,147,600 travelers visited the island in the first six months of 2016, an 11.7 percent rise on the same period in 2015. In 2015 the total number of visitors to Cuba was 3,524,779 compared to 3,002,745 in 2014, a 17 percent increase. Last year some 161,233 Americans traveled to Cuba compared to just 63,046 in 2010, a 156 percent increase in five years, making American visitors the fourth largest group of arrivals last year after Canadians, Cubans living abroad, and Germans.
This surge in American travel Cuba relates to the December 2014 detente between the United States and its old Cold War foe. In early 2015, President Barack Obama relaxed the OFAC travel rules to Cuba for American citizens permitting travel in 12 categories under a general license; this was further relaxed in March 2016 before his historic visit to the island: individual travelers can now self-certify and plan their own educational, people-to-people visits to the island.
The Tour Crunch
But where are all these visitors staying? According to Cuban statistics, the overwhelming majority of visitors (3,446,288) stayed in hotels on the island in 2015 with Cuba reporting it had 66,389 rooms (excluding the burgeoning priv
