KINGSTON, Jamaica--Jamaican Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett headed to the US cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia last week in order to drum up more tourism support and arrivals from American markets.
The meetings have been organised in order to explore new services to Jamaica and also as a chance to seek opportunities for increased airlift into the island.
Bartlett said, “Through the Jamaica Tourist Board, we have engaged in an aggressive campaign targeting new and emerging markets. Therefore, this brief trip to the United States is crucial.
“The meetings with travel agents and tour operators in Baltimore … were very productive – aiding efforts to cultivate new relationships with travel partners. We will be making a few announcements from this meeting as soon as we have finalised details.”
The minister, who is joined by Director of Tourism, Donovan White, was due to meet with several executives in the North American tourism and leisure market in an attempt to get more airlift into Jamaica.
The team will also meet with investors about possible developments at Frenchman’s Cove in Portland, Jamaica.
The Jamaican Ministry of Tourism has achieved significant increases in the number of travellers to Jamaica as well as increasing Jamaica’s profile, over the last 12 months.
In early May 2018, Bartlett announced that Jamaica was well on target to increasing airlift for the 2018-2019 year, adding that thousands of additional seats had been negotiated for the 2018-2019 winter tourist season, which will give further momentum to the market.
Those seats include 38,000 more seats out of the United States; a record 42,400 additional seats out of Canada; 12,000 more seats from Continental Europe; and 7,455 more seats out of the United Kingdom and Northern Europe.
In 2017, a total of 1,509,963 stopover visitors came to Jamaica from the US. The annual average growth rate for visitors from the US over the past five years (2013 to 2017) was 4.4 per cent.
Bartlett announced in September that the Jamaican government had signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, and the parties are scheduled to meet later this year to “start hammering out a product for the market.”
The multi-destination strategy is one of three legacy outcomes from last November’s United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) global conference in Montego Bay, which ended with the 15-point “Montego Bay Declaration,” which commits participating countries to developing tourism assets in small and medium-sized business development in tourism; climate change resiliency awareness and support mechanisms; and the setting of an overall action plan for tourism, looking forward to the year 2030.
In mid-July, the Jamaican tourism ministry also made the public aware of how close the government was to finalising the pension scheme for Jamaican tourism workers, set to roll out in September 2018, but the programme has been delayed, according to Bartlett in mid-October.
Bartlett said that the Jamaican government is looking at labour market contracts and arrangements and corresponding legislation that would allow for a pension scheme to coincide with those arrangements in place.
Despite this setback, Bartlett said he is confident that, even with the delay, the pension scheme for tourism workers will be in place by end of the year. ~ Caribbean News Now
