Jamaica is in the midst of a summer tourism “boom,” with what officials are describing as the island’s best summer tourist season ever.
The island has already reported more than 2 million combined stopover and cruise visitors so far in 2023, buoyed by a summer-month surge.
“Already before even completing the first six months of this year we have already received a combined 2 million stopover and cruise visitors with record earnings of US$2 billion, a whopping 18% above the 2019 earnings for the same time period. It should be no surprise then that Jamaica is bracing for the best summer tourist season ever,” said Jamaica Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett.
Last year, Jamaica welcomed a combined total of 3.3 million cruise and stay over visitors.
Those numbers led to $3.7 billion USD in tourism earnings.
So far this summer, air travel bookings are up by 33 percent compared to the very-strong summer of 2022, according to data provided by analytics firm ForwardKeys.
The island has secured 1.4 million air seats for this summer, about 1.2 million of which are from the United States market.
That represents a 16 percent jump over the island’s all-time summer high in 2019.