UK tax dulls travel interest in Jamaica

Cheapflights Media, an international media network providing users with ways to find low-cost travel, says annual online searches for popular island destina-tions Jamaica and Barbados have seen 13.2 per cent and 23 per cent falls, respectively.

The search engine is blaming the reduction in traffic on the "regressive" Air Passenger Duty (APD), which was further increased by the United Kingdom Government yesterday.

In fact, the company has been tracking the impact of APD on traffic searching for Caribbean destinations on its UK site over the past year, following that European country's introduction of the sharply increased four-tier tax in November 2009.

"Annual traffic data to end September 2010 for eight popular Caribbean destinations on Cheap-flights.co.uk shows an average annual 11.6 per cent drop in Caribbean destination searches compared to the previous year," stated the report.

Introduced in 1994 as a 'Green Tax', levied until February 2007, APD will have risen 275 per cent above pre-2007 rates for all cabin classes to the Caribbean.