'Live Boricua' Launch Highlights Surging Puerto Rico Arrivals

Puerto Rico emerged from the post-outbreak travel environment as a high-value travel destination, with the numbers to prove it. Through the end of April, passenger arrivals into San Juan's Luis Marin International Airport are up 29 percent from one year ago, officials said this week.

The airport's total capacity for 2022 is 5.9 percent higher than 2021, which was a record year for overnight visitors. Finally, domestic capacity for the year is up 2.9 percent while international capacity is up 49.9 percent.

Building on that success, the destination's marketing organization, Discover Puerto Rico, this week launched "Live Boricua," a consumer marketing campaign focused on "insights, creative, and assets from and driven by Puerto Ricans highlighting how to enjoy experiences the Boricua way," according to Discover Puerto Rico officials.

We spoke with Leah Chandler, Discover Puerto Rico's chief marketing officer, to discuss the elements that have contributed to the island's tourism success and how the new campaign positions Puerto Rico for continued arrivals growth.

LC: The campaign is the first brand campaign we've launched since April of 2019. When we opened our doors on July first of 2018 as the first-ever private entity to market tourism to the world for Puerto Rico, we did some research and found that consumers really had a very neutral perception about the destination.

LC: [Consumers] didn't know a lot about the Puerto Rico and many didn't understand Puerto Rico's connectivity to the U.S. So we were starting with somewhat of a blank slate which is why we took on an initiative to sort of reintroduce Puerto Rico to the world through that grand campaign in 2019.

Now as we start to emerge from the pandemic, we're ready to hit the reset button and launched the new campaign with the tagline "Live Boricua." We feel like it really is Puerto Rico's moment to reintroduce the island again to the world because we have great momentum coming out of 2021 we're hitting a lot of records in 2022 and we feel like it really is the perfect time for us to kind of emerge from some of the challenges the island has faced."