For all the damage that has been inflicted on Jamaica’s tourism industry by the onset of COVID-19, notably its impact on tourist arrivals and consequential tourist spending, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) territory continues to back its visitor appeal by projecting a better year for the industry, the ongoing travails of the pandemic notwithstanding.
Last week the island’s Tourism Minister, Edmund Bartlett, announced that the industry is projected to realise around US$1.88 billion in earnings from a tourism industry which is projecting that it will receive 1.6 million visitors in a country that is still some distance from recovering from the all-round impact of the virus.
Last week, Bartlett released figures projecting that this year the country’s tourist industry will welcome one million and forty three stopover visitors, numbers representing an increase of 117 per cent on last year’s stopover numbers. Bartlett says, meanwhile, that the country’s tourism industry will receive 570,000 cruise ship visitors, an amount representing a 100% increase over the preceding period.
It would be a remarkable recovery for what is arguably the most popular tourist island in CARICOM where the tourist industry, including resort visits and hotel occupancy had been devastated by the sudden global squeeze of international travel in an effort to check the spread of the pandemic. Bartlett estimates that the Jamaica tourist industry should “have up to 60 per cent coverage of the United States market by the end of May,” which he said should be “very significant” for the country. He said that the figures were “very flattering” when account is taken of the fact that the country’s tourist industry “literally came to a halt due to COVID-19.”
Bartlett’s upbeat projection marks a stunning upturn in outlook from a year ago when the Jamaica Gleaner reported that the tourism sector, the country’s second largest foreign exchange earner, was expected to haemorrhage approximately J$76 billion as the forecast for the 2020-2021 fiscal year buckled under the impact of the pandemic in international travel.
Jamaica, according to Bartlett, is also seeking to expand the frontiers of its tourism industry, with the Parish of St. Thomas having been targeted as “the new frontier.” He said that both the planning and the design for St. Thomas had been completed and that the design would be rolled out this year.
Jamaica, Bartlett noted, will be using the COVID-19 vaccination programme globally to help determine “how much we accelerate our marketing efforts in these source countries.”
