Jamaica is expecting to top 4 million combined visitors in 2023 — that is, putting together both air and cruise passenger arrivals. 

Jamaica Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett is on pace to record 4.1 million visitors — a number he thinks is just the tip of the iceberg for the island’s tourism sector. 

“I think we can do eight million,” he said this week at the recent grand opening of the new Hideaway at Royalton Blue Waters resort in greater Montego Bay. “We must be ambitious. Jamaica has the diversity in its tourism product to attract that many visitors.”

“I think we must set new targets; we need to be pushing ourselves more because we have the potential,” Bartlett said. 

The island has largely put the pandemic in its rear-view mirror, thanks in part to one of the earliest post-Covid reopenings in the Caribbean, one that happened back in the summer of 2020.