Tourism arrivals inching along
Published:Sunday | August 30, 2020 | 1:02 AMNeville Graham - Business Reporter
After a tentative reopening on June 15, summer tourist arrivals are less than a third of normal levels.
Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett says the latest count shows that 120,000 tourists have come to Jamaica since the country reopened its borders to vacationers and that they have spent about US$150 million.
Bartlett says Jamaica is probably spoilt by historically higher numbers but that given the COVID-19 pandemic, the country could be thankful for the business it is getting.
“It’s very low, in that it is about 30 per cent of what we should have had, but Jamaica’s performance is still ahead of other regional destinations,” he told the Financial Gleaner on Friday.
Jamaica, which normally gets more than four million tourists per year, reopened to visitors in mid-June after a hard closure of its borders to all travel in March.
Jamaica typically earns more than US$3 billion per annum from the tourism and travel market, numbers that have been decimated by the pandemic and are projected to fall below US$900 million this year.
Bartlett says that given tourism’s importance, Jamaica had to find a way to keep a delicate balance between keeping the economic wheels turning while maintaining tight control over the possibility of a massive outbreak of COVID-19. Key to the strategy was the establishment of a COVID-Resilient Corridor stretching from Negril in the west to Port Antonio in the north-east, allowing Ministry of Health and Wellness personnel easy access to tourism entities operating on the coast.
Jamaica’s approach is a first for any market, Bartlett said.
“The COVID-Resilient Corridor is a model to the world as to how best to manage visitors during this challenging period. What it does is to create a pretty much sterile area that allows for good management, keeping the visitors within that geographical boundary and reducing the possibility of community spread,” Bartlett said.
There have been howls of protest from some tourism stakeholders who are outside the corridor, but the tourism minister says it does encapsulate the majority of the market.
“The corridor was established as the most tourism-driven area in Jamaica because within that area are about 80 per cent of Jamaica’s touristic assets,” Bartlett noted.
“We couldn’t include everywhere because we had to have the sort of architecture that allows the health authorities to manage with the resources that we have. All of us will have to bear some pain, some more than others because of the nature of how our business is set up,” he said.