Caribbean tourism runs on a handful of terms that are used loosely and mean very different things. Here is what they actually mean — and why the difference costs destinations money.
The place a visitor genuinely comes from — where they live, decide and pay — as opposed to the airport or country they last departed from.
Why it matters: a source market identifies the population that produces your visitors. A departure country only tells you the route they took. Budget against the first and you reach people; budget against the second and you advertise to an airport.
The discipline of establishing where a destination's visitors actually originate, using verified behavioural records rather than sampled surveys or border counts — and then ranking those origins by the value of the visitors they produce.
Why it matters: knowing who arrived is history. Knowing which market produced them is strategy.
Records created when a visitor registers and pays for something directly — such as a carnival band. The record shows where they signed up from, what they purchased, and whether they have registered before.
Why it matters: it is transactional evidence, created at the moment of commitment. Nobody misremembers a payment they made.
A visitor whose trip is motivated by participation in a cultural event — a carnival, a festival — rather than by a generic beach holiday.
Why it matters: cultural travellers book months ahead, travel in groups, spend above the destination average, and return at unusually high rates. They are the most valuable visitor most destinations fail to measure properly.
Evidence that a visitor has returned, derived from repeat registration history rather than survey recall.
Why it matters: it is the cleanest proxy for real loyalty, and it is the foundation of any credible year-round strategy. A destination that cannot identify its repeat visitors cannot deliberately create more of them.
A source market made up largely of people with family or ancestral ties to a destination, usually concentrated in a small number of overseas cities.
Why it matters: diaspora markets are routinely under-counted, because travellers get recorded at the hub they connected through rather than the city they live in. They are frequently a destination's most loyal audience and its most invisible one.
A questionnaire given to a sample of departing visitors, usually at an airport gate.
Why it matters: it captures what a traveller remembers, days later, on the way home — useful for sentiment, unreliable for spend and origin.
Official counts of travellers entering a country, typically recorded by last port of departure or by nationality.
Why it matters: they measure the border crossing, not the market. A visitor who lives in London and connects through Miami can be attributed to the United States — and the marketing budget follows the error.
What a visitor is worth across their lifetime with a destination, not on a single trip — spend per trip combined with likelihood of return.
Why it matters: ranking markets by yield rather than by volume regularly reorders a destination's priority list. A smaller market that returns every year can outperform a larger one that never comes back.
Treating a carnival visitor as the start of a relationship rather than a one-week transaction, and using verified repeat behaviour to bring the same high-value visitor back outside the event season.
Why it matters: the hardest part of tourism marketing is persuading a stranger to come. A carnival visitor is not a stranger — they have already chosen you once.
The body responsible for attracting visitors to a destination — a national tourism authority, tourist board, or regional tourism agency.
Why it matters: the DMO holds the budget that visitor-origin intelligence is meant to protect.
Converting a defined source market into actual arrivals through targeted marketing, distribution and routing — as distinct from destination awareness advertising, which is not tied to a measurable origin.
Why it matters: awareness is spent. Acquisition is invested. The difference is whether you can name the market you are buying.
We map your destination's real source markets — and show you the ones your arrival statistics are hiding.
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