Jamaica Has A Message For Canada – Come Back
There’s no doubt that the Canadian market is important to Jamaica. It always has been, but the significance of the relationship was reinforced this week as Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett led a high-powered delegation of senior tourism officials on a mission to Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa to participate in a Tourism Investment Forum; visit George Brown College, home of a satellite Global Tourism Resilience Centre; and take part in a session on cyber security at Carleton University.
It was definitely a good news visit, with Minister Bartlett telling Press Today that: “Jamaica’s recovery has continued a pace, so that right now we’re about 97% recovered. We have our first 2 million visitors for the year last month [end of October]. We’re looking to get to 2.5 million by the end of the year and that, when added to Cruise, could take us into 3.2 to 3.3 million or in that region. So, we’re well on our way to going back to the 4.3 million visitors that we had in 2019 — with Cruise and Stopover [visitors].
Noting that Jamaica’s tourism earnings are now 20% above 2019 levels, the Minister said: “We earned a little over $3.7 billion in 2017 and we’re expecting to earn $4.2 billion at the end of this fiscal year and that is a good $500 million more, which is very significant indeed.”
Minister Bartlett was also in an upbeat mood when it came to a discussion of tourism investments.
He told Press Today that: “The investment prospects for tourism has a new lease on life, never before in our history have we had the prospects of more new rooms [being] added – you’re looking at some 15,000 new rooms in the next 5 years … currently under construction and ground-breaking are just a little over 6,000 currently, with others to come in 2023, 2024.”
As for travel advisors, Minister Bartlett made it clear that they were “a very important part of Jamaica’s tourism landscape.”
He said that Jamaica “will continue to support them by providing incentives, fams, useful tools that they can use to strengthen their knowledge of Jamaica and increase arrivals.”
And he concluded: “Our recovery could never have happened without them, nor is our future anticipated without them.”
Stay tuned, there’s lots more to come from Jamaica.
In the photo
Seen here, from l to r, are Angella Bennett, Director, Canada for the Jamaica Tourist Board and Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett.
