Punta Cana, located on the east coast of the Dominican Republic, has become internationally recognized as a beautiful tropical vacation paradise with luxurious, eco-chic and affordable accommodations. In fact, Punta Cana has now become the number 1 tourist destination in the entire Caribbean, and this incredible transformation has taken place in just 28 years! This news has been featured in many of the popular travel magazines and websites. I want you to know that this statistic is based on REAL data, not just hype. The statistics are compiled by the Caribbean Tourism Organization, a non-profit organization that closely follows 29 countries in the Caribbean region.
I will discuss these data in more detail below. My discussion will focus on the data released in 2010, as the Caribbean Tourism Organization has not yet released the statistics for December 2011, so there is not yet a complete set of data for that year. However, if you study the available data for the first 11 months of 2011, the general trends remain the same.
The Dominican Republic received more non-resident airport arrivals than any other Caribbean country, easily surpassing Cuba, the second most popular tourist destination. The following is a quick reference list so you can see the top 10 Caribbean destinations along with the total reported number of non-resident airport arrivals:
1. Dominican Republic – 4,124,543
2. Cuba – 2,531,745
3. Cancun Mexico – 2,106,485
4. Jamaica- 1,921,678
5. Puerto Rico – 1,369,814
6. Bahamas – 1,368,053
7. Aruba- 825,451
8. US Virgin Islands – 691,194
9. Martinique – 476,492
10. Saint Martin – 443,136
Now, let’s break these stats down even further into European travel, US travel, and Canadian travel. Europeans overwhelmingly choose the Dominican Republic as their favorite Caribbean vacation spot. His next favorite is Cuba. The United States has a close 4-way race between Cancun, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Cancún outperforms the other 3, but the Dominican Republic gained 6.8% in just one year and this trend continues. Punta Cana is now the number 1 destination within the Dominican Republic for Americans, replacing Puerto Plata on the north coast, which used to be the number 1 destination. Canadians also seem to really like the Dominican Republic, especially Punta Cana, and choose it as their second favorite vacation spot in the Caribbean after Cuba. Please note that residents of the United States cannot travel to Cuba.
So with these compelling data in mind, let me ask:
How did Punta Cana become so popular?
With so many popular tourist destinations, it would be hard to pinpoint one specific thing that made the area soar in popularity. Not so with Punta Cana. On the coast of Punta Cana, stretching some 39 miles from Bávaro in the north to Cap Cana in the south, there is an easily identifiable event that took place in 1984 that literally changed everything and completely transformed this region in the mega-popular tourist. fate that is today.
Have I already piqued your curiosity? Keep reading…
Punta Cana is absolutely beautiful. It offers wide beaches of silky white sand with a bright and warm blue sea along its coast. It is so tempting that it draws you in; some say it even “seduces” you. When you add to that the thick grove of coconut palms that sway in the tropical breeze along the entire coastline of this region, you have the iconic Caribbean paradise seen on postcards sent to those who weren’t lucky enough to continue. the trip but that I surely wish I had.
However, before 1984 few people really knew about this tropical gem. It remained largely undiscovered by most world travelers until the construction of the Punta Cana International Airport (PUJ). In Spanish, the official language of the Dominican Republic, this international airport is called “Punta Cana International Airport”.
You see, no matter how spectacular a place is, if you don’t have a convenient and inexpensive way to get to the area, a lot of people won’t see it. Before the Punta Cana International Airport was built, the small runway that had been built in 1971 could not handle the large jet planes. Also, to get there from another country, you had to fly to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and then endure a bumpy 4-hour bus or taxi ride to Punta Cana. The unpaved road was narrow and crowded. giant potholes. The road was also washed out in heavy rain and motorized vehicles were sometimes held up by horse traffic, making the pace of weary travelers wanting to reach their hotel miserable.
PUJ’s air traffic has grown by leaps and bounds and is on track this year (2012) to serve over 4 million people! It now receives much more traffic than the next busiest airport in the capital of Santo Domingo. There is no other private airport in the world that comes close to this degree of business success.
People come to Punta Cana from all over the world now. International airlines serving Punta Cana Airport include Air Canada, AirTran, American Airlines, British Airways, Continental, Delta, JetBlue, KLM, Spirit, United, US Airways and Westjet. USA 300, recently defunct (as of January 30, 2012), was established by Apple Vacations and also served PUJ for a long time. Canadian charter airlines to the Punta Cana airport include Air Transat, Sunwig, Skyservice and Canjet. They run during the cold and bleak Canadian winters.
So an area that started with very humble beginnings some 4 decades ago now commonly provides beds for over 70,000 people at a time. Punta Cana has definitely established itself as one of the best places world travelers think to go. And…there is no end in sight to the growth of this area. Punta Cana’s roughly 39-mile coastline has essentially been a “gold rush” for major hotel corporations, especially Spanish-owned ones, ever since the international airport opened up the area. Classy high-rise resorts, perfectly positioned to take advantage of the view, have sprung up almost overnight. The infrastructure has also vastly improved as money has poured in for big projects.
Europeans and Canadians seemed to have “discovered” Punta Cana before the Americans. However, over the last 10 to 15 years, Americans have quickly caught up. In fact, this has happened at such a rapid rate that entire resorts have been built to cater specifically to American Americans, as the customs of Europeans and Americans sometimes clash a bit within resorts, although some Americans prefer the European environment.
Americans and Canadians in the Eastern Standard Time zone can depart on a direct flight in the morning and arrive in Punta Cana at noon with no jet lag as the time zones are the same, except during daylight savings time when it’s only one hour different. Even a trip from the west coast of the United States or Canada is a relatively easy trip compared to other equally exotic destinations.
Punta Cana Airport also fits in very well with the Dominican landscape and makes a good first impression when tourists enter the country. It has an open-air design with a picturesque thatched roof made of palm leaves. All the materials used to build the airport were brought from local sources, including palm, local wood and native coral. This was a very intentional effort by Frank Rainieri and the other investors in Grupo Punta Cana who financed the airport privately. Lacking funds for a project of this magnitude, Frank Rainieri approached a Dominican architecture student at Pratt University. He agreed to do it free of charge to establish a name for himself. Since then he has become quite famous and has been well paid for other projects in the Dominican Republic.
Originally, Grupo Punta Cana tried to get the Dominican Republic government to finance, or at least partially finance, the construction of the international airport, but after 8 years they realized that they had to privately finance it on their own. They must be given credit for their vision and persistence because a private airport of this magnitude has never been built before. However, they had the much-needed approval and cooperation of the Dominican Republic government or the project would never have gotten off the ground.
There you have it. The tourist success of the coast of Punta Cana depended on one thing: building an international airport capable of providing tourists with easy and cheap access to this beautiful paradise. It took incredible vision and perseverance.