Jamaica Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett has “cautious optimism” for what a potential “major upturn” in visitor arrivals this upcoming winter tourist season, he said this week. 

At the end of February 2020, Jamaica had reported a 5.5 percent increase in visitor arrivals compared to the same period in 2019, or about 1.25 million visitors. 

“If that trend held for the rest of the year, we estimated end of year earnings at US$4 billion, with 4.5 million visitors,” Bartlett said this week. “Obviously, we have now been forced to revise all preliminary estimates due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.”

“Thankfully, we are already seeing positive signs that buoyancy is slowly returning to the sector,” he said. 

Maintaining current levels of demand, he said, the projection is for more than 1 million visitors by the end of the year. 

That “would be a fairly impressive achievement, all things being considered,” he said. “This would take into account the first quarter of the year when all arrivals were somewhere in the region of 800,000 people.”

— CJ