We investigate the impact of hurricanes on airplane and cruise ship arrivals in the Caribbean. To this end, we construct a monthly panel of airline and cruise ship arrivals and hurricane destruction and employ a panel vector autoregressive model with an exogenous shock (VARX) to quantify the dynamic effects of tourist arrivals after a hurricane for 18 Caribbean countries over the period 2000–2013. The results suggest an immediate decline in the month of a strike and up to one month after on cruise ship (2.33 and 1.21 percentage points) and airplane (0.57 and 0.27 percentage points) arrivals. Moreover, a strong recovery in airplane arrivals in months 3–6 following a hurricane was sufficient to induce a net positive effect of around 2 percentage points of total tourist arrivals into the region.
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