Just over two years ago, as COVID-19 cut a swathe through the Caribbean striking in the process at the very heart of the region’s key Tourism industry, Jamaica’s Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announced what might well have been considered the unthinkable, that the country’s highly prized and decidedly successful tourism industry was confronted with “imminent closure” given what a March 20, 2020 Jamaica Observer said had been the imposition of “travel restrictions on many of its source markets as well as local containment and restriction protocols.”
The admission had comes even as some of the island’s larger hotel chains and small hotels were laying off workers and hotel chains were announcing that they would stop receiving guests on account of covid-19 restrictions. Unsurprisingly, the dramatic decline of the country’s tourism industry quickly became one of the focal points for across-the-island social discourse, a circumstance that reflected the weight of the dependence of the island’s economy, not least employment, on visitor arrivals.
During the period that followed the media across the Caribbean continued to paint a grim picture of the dramatic meltdown of the tourism industry in the region paying particular interest on the devastating loss of jobs at just about every level of the sector and the attendant socio-economic crisis that was ravaging thousands of homes across the heavily tourism-dependent Caribbean islands, not least, Jamaica.
So dramatic and severe had been the decline in tourist arrivals in the region that some reports were decidedly reluctant to speculate on a time frame for a return to normalcy.
Recent reports coming from the Caribbean island, however, would appear to point to a vigorous ‘turning of the worm’ in Jamaica’s tourism industry. Just days ago the country’s Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett told Jamaicans and the world a story of a seeming remarkable recovery in the sector that has seen the island rake in US$5.7 billion in earnings since reopening its doors to tourists.
Recent data generated on the performance of the country’s tourism industry showed that Jamaica welcomed more than five million visitors since the reopening of the sector that resulted in its “best summer ever.”
In June the island reportedly recorded in excess of 224,000 stopover arrivals, ‘numbers’ that sent an unmistakable message that even the fearsome ravages of the globally devastating pandemic did little to dim international confidence in the CARICOM member country as a world class tourist destination.
And even as Jamaica’s subject Minister was vigorously blowing on the island’s tourism trumpet, the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association was shining a spotlight on “the response to the 40th edition of its Caribbean Travel Marketplace (CTM) as regional suppliers and global buyers return to in-person business development activities in the Caribbean since the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.”
Against the backdrop of what was almost certainly the most challenging episode in the history of tourism in the Caribbean CTM Chairperson Karen Whitt was quoted as saying that “the Caribbean is still one of the world’s most desirable destinations and that the region was pleased “with the convergence of buyers and sellers of Caribbean tourism as the Caribbean continues to advance its post pandemic recovery.”
Not only does it appear that Jamaica’s tourism sector has successfully navigated the choppy waters of the pandemic but that it has come out ‘at the other end’ with a generous measure of optimism about the longer term future of the sector. According to The Observer report, the CHTA’s “data partner” Forward Keys is reporting that “the Caribbean and Latin America are leading the summer outlook in terms of the return of leisure travel.” The Forward Keys report says that “based on confirmed visitor arrivals this summer,” Aruba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Mexico and The Bahamas – have been among the “most resilient” tourism service providers this summer “based on confirmed arrivals.”
