KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett WILL meet with stakeholders on Thursday to examine their needs and opportunities, given the significant tourism growth.
BartlettThe meeting comes as the sector remains on track to add 20,000 new hotel rooms over the next 10 to 15 years, with nearly 3,000 new rooms to go on stream this year.
“So, think of the demand now that this creates,” Bartlett said.
He shared that the meeting with the tourism stakeholders will explore what the additional rooms “means for human capital development, for skills and training and more importantly, for our local production capacity because we will have to do more in 2024”.
Bartlett was speaking earlier this week at the launch of the Blue Mountain Coffee Festival.
The seventh staging of the event is slated for Saturday, March 2, at Newcastle, just on the outskirts of the Corporate Area.
Bartlett also shared that three million stopover visitors are expected this year.
“Three million tourists in a country of 2.8 million people means that for the first time, the real flow-through effect of the tourism dollar is going to be felt by a larger and larger portion of the population,” he noted.
The Tourism Minister pointed out that 73 percent of tourists to Jamaica come from the world’s top coffee-consuming country, the United States; there are opportunities for increasing production capacity, investment in coffee, tourism, and its linkages.
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