Islandhopping: The Caribbean Trip the Caribbean Should Own

The archipelago is built for the multi-island journey. The ferries, the visas and the fares are built against it. Fixing that is a tourism strategy hiding in plain sight.

Look at a map of the Eastern Caribbean and the product designs itself: a chain of distinct islands within sight of one another, each with its own food, music, beaches and character, ideal for a journey that strings several together. Islandhopping should be the region's signature trip.

The infrastructure fights it. Inter-island flights are expensive and thin, ferry networks are patchy and underfunded, and a traveler can find it cheaper and simpler to fly home and back than to hop next door. The friction is regulatory and logistical, not geographic.

The prize for fixing it is large: longer stays, higher spend spread across more islands, and a product no single-island destination can match. A serious regional ferry and fare framework would turn a scattering of small markets into one big one. The sea that separates the islands could just as easily connect them.