Jamaica’s tourism minister, Edmund Bartlett, has said that the island is now positioned to completely recover from the Covid-19 outbreak, after one of the island’s most successful weekends in recent memory.
Between last Thursday and Sunday, a total of 27,000 visitors arrived in the Caribbean resort, setting a new record for the period since the epidemic began.
According to Bartlett, “this is crucial because it demonstrates that the month of March, which normally is a busy one, has started off strongly, and the bookings are predicting a very, very good March, which would correspond to the month of March in 2019.”
It has been officially declared that the tourist sector is on the verge of a complete comeback.
Last Saturday was an exceptionally busy day, with 8,700 passengers arriving at the airport in a single day.
The contribution of travel and tourism to the Jamaican Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 35% in 2019.
Bartlett said that it is critical for tourist employees to get back on the job as soon as possible as the epidemic recedes in severity.
As the minister pointed out, “it is also extremely important for suppliers, who will benefit from having some predictability in terms of the flow of visitors that will be required to come in, and it also speaks to our investment and financial partners, who will benefit from our being able to apply more resources to the visitors’ consumption patterns,” he said.
He expressed his excitement about the potential for agriculture and said that his ministry has chosen to strengthen assistance for the production push, as well as for manufacturers, ground transportation, cultural service providers, and entertainers.
As he continued, “This is a critical time, and as we recover, we want to heal together so that the tourist supply chain can be injected with a strong local content, so that the dollar can remain in Jamaica, and so that the actual advantages from tourism go to the people of Jamaica.”
