Research paper · 6 October 2026
When Arrivals Recover but Paid Nights Do Not: Measuring Tourism Recovery under Incomplete Accommodation Coverage in Saint Lucia
Saint Lucia Policy Analysis · Evidence cutoff: 6 October 2026
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23197449
Abstract
Visitor arrivals, paid accommodation nights, domestic production and income accruing to residents measure different aspects of tourism recovery. This paper reconciles Saint Lucia's published record and develops a decision protocol for cases in which those measures diverge. It assembles 132 monthly arrival observations for 2015–2025, a common-vintage annual visitor series for 2011–2025, and separately classified incomplete 2026 evidence. In 2025, stay-over arrivals were 0.7% above 2019, while published paid nights were approximately 13.6% lower. Real accommodation-and-food-services gross value added was 9.7% higher, providing contrary evidence to a simple equation of fewer nights with lower domestic production, although industry GVA is not tourism direct value added. An exact symmetric decomposition allocates the approximately 380,000-night decline to an arrival contribution of +18,000 and a published-night-intensity contribution of −398,000; the latter does not identify shorter stays. The paper proves conditional accounting and decision results, executes coverage and survey-selection experiments, and enumerates a hypothetical measurement-cost frontier. Compatible expenditure observations can eliminate separate coverage and yield uncertainty from an income comparison, changing which measurements are worth buying. Current public evidence does not identify a national tourism resident-income growth rate. The contribution is an audited Saint Lucia application and an executable measurement protocol, not a new decomposition theorem or a measured retention coefficient. A staged programme assigns institutional owners, release requirements and review rules while preserving an explicit “unresolved” classification.
Keywords: Saint Lucia; tourism recovery; paid person-nights; accommodation coverage; partial identification; visitor expenditure; resident income; statistical capacity.
Citation
Michel, K. L. (2026). When Arrivals Recover but Paid Nights Do Not: Measuring Tourism Recovery under Incomplete Accommodation Coverage in Saint Lucia. Saint Lucia Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23197449
Evidence and reproducibility
The self-contained PDF includes the literature and novelty audit, methods and proofs, executed results, full numerical inputs, source and revision audit, reproducible code, references and AI-use disclosure. Unverified 2026 endpoints are kept outside the principal empirical results.