Senate clash over Tourism Levy Bill

Opposition and government senators clashed in the upper chamber on Wednesday over the Tourism Levy (Amendment) Bill, which proposes new tax measures for the hospitality industry and tighter oversight of online booking platforms.

The bill proposes, among other measures, the introduction of a shared‑economy levy requiring global booking platforms to collect and remit a 10 per cent tax to the Barbados Revenue Authority.

The opposition’s Senator Ryan Walters took issue with the government’s assertion that “tourism pays the bills” in Barbados. While agreeing that tourism remains vital to the economy, he argued that recent performance figures tell a less flattering story.

“It’s an interesting statement. It’s true,” Senator Walters said. “However, the contribution to our GDP as relates to tourism says that this government is doing a good job – or it says that it’s doing an extremely poor job.”

He pointed to historical data, noting that tourism contributed approximately 13 per cent to gross domestic product between 2016 and 2018. By contrast, he claimed that in 2023, 2024 and up to September 2025, tourism’s contribution had fallen to below five per cent.

“That is not a record to boast about,” Senator Walters argued. “That does not qualify the statement that tourism pays our bills. That is saying the government can no longer afford to pay its bills, because it is not earning as it should in tourism.”

In response, Senator Lisa Cummins pushed back strongly, citing data from the Central Bank of Barbados from the same period to support the government’s position that the sector has been recovering steadily, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID‑19 pandemic.

Referencing the Central Bank’s October 2025 quarterly report, Sen Cummins said long‑stay arrivals rose by 5.5 per cent over the first nine months of the year. She explained that the data, presented in a slide tracking arrivals from 2010 to 2025, showed clear market‑by‑market trends across the United States, Europe, CARICOM, the United Kingdom and Canada.

“It shows that in 2020 through 2021, the world stopped and arrivals vanished,” she said. “They plummeted sharply in 2020 to 2021, and as it plummeted sharply, it rose just as sharply between 2021 and 2022.”

Senator Cummins highlighted the United Kingdom as the fastest‑recovering market, noting that arrivals rebounded to 2018 levels by 2021 and continued to grow in 2022. She also pointed to a 12 per cent increase in arrivals from the United States between 2021 and 2022, with European markets broadly keeping pace.

Addressing Sen Walters’s reference to 2018 as a benchmark year, Senator Cummins noted that the opposition senator failed to mention the key reason why tourism numbers dropped sharply after the 2018 high. She stressed that Barbados was on track to surpass that performance before the pandemic intervened.

“By February 2019, we were on target for over 900,000 visitors,” she said, compared with roughly 800,000 arrivals in 2018. “Had we not had to shut down for COVID, we would have had an increase by the time the tourism season ended.”

Beyond raw arrival numbers, Senator Cummins said the government recognised early on that a key challenge was maintaining employment during the traditionally slower summer months.

“This government came to office and made a determination that we needed to ensure we had a year‑round tourism economy,” she said, describing discussions with cruise‑industry stakeholders about expanding summer cruising.

But she acknowledged that large‑scale summer cruising remains difficult, as cruise lines typically redeploy vessels to the Mediterranean during warmer months.

“What did Barbados do?” she asked. “We decided that while we may not have all of the larger vessels, there is an opportunity in some of the smaller luxury vessels.”

These ships, she argued, may carry fewer passengers but attract higher‑spending visitors, delivering economic benefits comparable to higher‑volume arrivals.