Jamaica just had its best summer of tourism – ever.
The Caribbean island posted its best stopover visitor arrivals figures and highest foreign exchange earnings for any summer in the history of the country.
The island has eclipsed what had been its previous record in 2019, with what is already more than 5,000 additional visitors compared to summer 2019.
“The better news is that our earnings in the summer are up 20 percent over 2019,” said Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett.
The numbers have already surpassed Jamaica tourism officials’ projections for 2022.
At the beginning of the year, Jamaica had forecasted $3.5 billion in tourism earnings and around 2.3 million stopover visitors.
“However, we are now up to 2.6 million projections for stopover visitors, not including cruise [passengers], and the projection for earnings is a whopping US$4.2 billion,” he said.
The totals mean Jamaica’s pandemic tourism recovery is far ahead of schedule.
Indeed, even before the onset of the pandemic, Jamaica did not anticipate reaching these levels until 2025.
“You see what recovery has done and how strong that recovery is,” Bartlett said.
Jamaica has also seen strong airlift growth, from significant expansions to traditional tourism poles like Montego Bay to a highly-anticipated new route to the Ian Fleming Airport near Ocho Rios.
The latter will be launching in November.
For more, visit Jamaica.