Most destination data describes a visitor after they have gone home. We read the moment they committed.
Almost every Caribbean destination measures its visitors with some combination of three instruments: arrival cards, exit surveys, and aggregate spend estimates. Each is useful. Each has the same structural weakness.
An arrival card tells you the country a traveller flew in from — which is frequently not the market that produced them. A visitor who lives in Brooklyn and connects through Miami can be counted as Miami. An exit survey asks a sample of departing travellers to recall what they did and what they spent, days after the fact, at an airport gate. And aggregate spend figures divide a large number by another large number, producing an average that describes nobody in particular.
The result is a picture that is directionally reasonable and specifically wrong — which is exactly the kind of data that quietly misallocates a marketing budget for years.
DIMA works from first-party registration and transaction records licensed from carnival and festival platforms — a base of over 600,000 verified cultural travellers.
The distinction that matters is not volume. It is provenance. A registration record is not a recollection; it is a transaction. When a visitor registers for a carnival band, they are not answering a researcher's question — they are committing money, months in advance, from wherever they actually live. That record is created at the moment of highest intent, and it captures three things a survey cannot reliably reach:
Where they signed up. Origin as expressed by the visitor's own registration and payment details — not the airport they transited.
What they bought. The band and package purchased, which is a direct, unrecalled record of spend at the core of the trip.
Whether they have been before. Repeat registration history, which is the cleanest available signal of genuine loyalty to a destination.
Origin is the claim we are most careful about, because it is the one most often wrong elsewhere. We do not accept a single field as proof. A market is only treated as confirmed when two independent signals agree: the country of registration and the country code attached to the visitor's own contact details.
Where those two signals disagree, the record is flagged rather than counted. This is deliberately conservative. It means we will sometimes under-claim a market rather than report a market that isn't really there — which is the correct trade when a destination is about to spend real money acting on the answer.
A single registration is an anecdote. A source market is a cluster of verified registrations, weighted by evidence — how many travellers it produces, what they purchase, and how reliably they return. We rank markets by that weighted strength rather than by raw headcount, because a small market that sends repeat, high-spend visitors is often worth more than a large market that sends one-time arrivals.
This is where destinations are most often surprised. The markets that dominate arrival statistics are not always the markets that produce the visitors who actually spend and come back. We show a destination that gap — for its own visitors, with its own data, in the room.
We would rather be trusted than impressive, so we are explicit about the edges of the evidence:
It is carnival- and festival-led. Our foundation is cultural-travel behaviour. It is strongest where carnival and festival culture drives visitation, and it does not claim to describe every visitor segment a destination receives.
Registration spend is not total trip spend. What a visitor pays for a band is a verified anchor, not their entire holiday. Published destination studies place total carnival visitor spend at roughly US$2,000–US$5,300 per trip (Trinidad and Tobago, approximately US$2,250 per visitor in 2024; Jamaica, up to US$5,321 per visitor in 2025). We reference those figures as context and are clear about which numbers are ours and which are theirs.
It describes people who registered. Visitors who attend without registering are outside the record. We do not silently extrapolate over that gap.
DIMA does not sell personal information. Destinations receive intelligence and analysis — source-market patterns, spend profiles, repeat-visitation behaviour — not individuals' personal data. The underlying records are handled under separate commercial and data-licensing agreements. See our privacy policy.
Destination-specific findings are not published. They are presented and worked through directly with your team, using your own data, in a working session — because the answer to "which markets should we actually be spending in" is a decision, not a download.
We will map your destination's real source markets and walk you through what they mean.
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