 Tourism officials anticipate improved arrivals in the next quarter after the nationwide lockdown in Britain, a major source market of St Lucia. This and other challenges to the sector at the start of the new year has had a significant impact on the momentum built in December 2020. The issues were discussed at a press conference hosted by the St Lucia tourism authority, St Lucia is adjusting its approach to marketing the destination as pandemic disruptions in source markets continue into the new year. Britain enters another country-wide lockdown to combat the fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus. Tourism Minister Hon. Dominic Fede says measures have been instituted in hopes of maintaining the sector. We have been using innovative marketing techniques to see how best we can encourage individuals to be able to come to our shores in the numbers that would make it sustainable for our hotels to remain open and for the airlines to keep flying. We do anticipate that a number of the airlines are going to pull back and scale back in terms of the capacity and that will no doubt affect arrivals. Fede also acknowledges the fuelled outbreaks in the United States posing a major challenge to the sector as well. There is a prevailing increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and the number of hospitalizations as well as the stress on the healthcare sector within the United States is also going to pose significant challenges on the ability of people to be able to travel. The new development now we're seeing is that a number of states are already requiring people to test on the way back and that did not happen in the earlier stages of our reopening. But this is going to pose a new challenge. It is going to no doubt be an impediment for people to be able to travel. The expected dip in arrivals due to further pandemic disruptions will break the momentum set in December 2020 which peaked at 10,000. While this represents 25% of figures recorded for that period in the previous year, it was a high performance under pandemic conditions. I think that a lot of hotels had a very good last week of the year. Boxing their arrivals registered over a thousand people, which really went back close to the levels of arrivals that we would have had pre-COVID-19. So there were some flashes of brilliance but the environment doesn't lend itself to being conducive for people to be able to travel in the volumes that they have over that period. So we expect to see tremendous fallout in comparison to how we have done in 2019 when we broke the record of about 423,000 visitors. For the Government Information Service, I am Jesse Leons reporting.