Recovering Visitor Arrivals From Major Source Markets

  • It is anticipated that tourist arrivals to the island will rise in the near term owing to the removal of travel bans placed on Jamaica by major source markets, and resumption of homeporting by major cruise lines. 
  • Jamaica was recently taken off the list of restricted countries to be visited by persons from the UK. Considering this, one company named TUI, the world’s largest tourism company, is going to restart flights as early as next weekend with 2,000 passengers coming into the country, leading to close to 100,000 room nights because of this one entity. 
  • In addition to this, the travel advisory had threatened plans for the resumption of homeporting for the AIDA Cruises in Montego Bay for November. However, the release of the travel advisory brings comfort and clears the way for AIDA Cruises to resume homeporting in Montego Bay. 
  • Homeporting is when a ship uses a port/marine terminal as its home, regardless of its port of registry. This allows passengers to begin/terminate a cruise in the home port and positively impacts ground transportation and tours. 
  • This means that given supply-chain arrangements,  Montego Bay entrepreneurs will have a chance to supply merchandise to those cruise ships coming. Hotels will also benefit from the overnight stay of people embarking and disembarking cruises and airport traffic should also increase. 
  • Furthermore, Canadian tourism has also returned to Jamaica and the tourism sector is now poised to enjoy some 82.0% of 2019’s traffic coming out of Canada, the island’s second largest source market. 
  • Additionally, out of the US, Expedia is showing that Jamaica is pacing second only to Mexico in the world, and Southwest and American Airlines are all similarly referencing Jamaica among the higher-pacing destinations for the winter season. 
  • Taken together, these developments augur well for a faster pace of recovery in the sector and accelerated return of lost jobs, which will support economic recovery and positively trending fiscal, foreign exchange and debt dynamics.

(Source: JIS News & NCBCM Research)