What was the promise of the Strategic Tourism Master Plan?
KRALENDIJK – Nearly ten years ago, Bonaire made a deliberate choice to chart a new course. The Strategic Tourism Master Plan (STMP), presented in 2017, did not merely outline a vision for the further development of tourism, it also set out a fundamental decision about the island’s future.
The ambition was explicitly not to simply attract more visitors. Tourism was above all meant to generate greater economic value, while keeping pressure on nature, infrastructure and quality of life manageable. As the plan approaches its tenth anniversary, an initial interim assessment seems warranted. Not to judge, with the benefit of hindsight, who was right at the time, but to examine to what extent the plan’s principles have become visible in the actual development of tourism.
With this series, Bonaire.nu holds the Strategic Tourism Master Plan’s key objectives up against the reality of 2025 and the first half of 2026.
That is more relevant than ever. In recent months, the debate about tourism has flared up again. Business owners are concerned about hotel occupancy rates, there is ongoing discussion about the development of various source markets, and the economic returns from tourism are increasingly being called into question. But behind all these separate debates lies a more fundamental question: has Bonaire achieved the kind of tourism development it set out for itself in 2017?
Anyone who reads the Strategic Tourism Master Plan today quickly discovers that it is far more than a growth plan. The nearly three-hundred-page study focuses surprisingly little on visitor numbers. Instead, one central idea runs throughout: Bonaire must develop into a high-quality destination where economic value matters more than mass growth. Its authors speak of a tourism sector that contributes more to the local economy, creates better employment, and at the same time protects the island’s qualities. Growth was not an end in itself, but a means to realise a more sustainable economic model.
Ten years on: the economic logic still holds
Remarkably, that economic reasoning has been reaffirmed almost a decade later. The Economic Impact Study by Ecorys and Tourism Economics, published in 2025, likewise concludes that North American visitors spend more on average, and that a larger share of this market, at the same number of tourist nights, can lead to greater employment and higher economic growth. The economic logic underpinning the choices made in 2017 thus appears to remain intact.
Growth in visitors, but faster growth in supply
That does not automatically mean the Strategic Tourism Master Plan has been successfully implemented. Reality, as so often, turns out to be more complex than a policy document’s starting points.
The number of staying tourists has grown strongly in recent years, and the United States has since become Bonaire’s second-largest tourist market. At the same time, the supply of hotels, apartments, villas and other forms of holiday accommodation grew at a pace barely anticipated in 2017. According to figures presented by TCB during a Tourism Update, available room capacity expanded significantly faster between 2017 and 2024 than the number of staying tourists. This raises the question of whether the current debate about hotel occupancy is primarily the result of lagging demand, or of a far more rapidly growing supply.
That, it seems, is where the crux of the current debate lies. In recent years, tourism on Bonaire has undeniably grown. But growth alone was never the benchmark the Strategic Tourism Master Plan set for itself. The central ambition was to increase the economic value of tourism. That is a meaningful distinction.
The benchmark the plan set for itself
More visitors do not automatically mean more prosperity. Every additional tourist also makes a claim on the island’s limited space, on infrastructure, nature, waste management, the housing market and, ultimately, on liveability for residents. The question is therefore not only how many tourists Bonaire receives, but how much economic value they add relative to the social and ecological pressures they create.
Almost ten years after the tourism master plan: did Bonaire grow the way it wanted to grow?
Perhaps that is the most important question the Strategic Tourism Master Plan still puts to us nearly ten years on. Not whether Bonaire has succeeded in attracting more tourists, but whether the island has succeeded in attracting better tourists, in the sense the plan itself intended: visitors who contribute more to the economy, without requiring unmanageable growth in tourism to do so.
That is precisely the question at the heart of this series. Not to judge the past, but to better understand what lessons ten years of tourism policy can offer for the choices Bonaire will once again have to make in the years ahead.
