KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Jamaica will host the second Global Tourism Resilience Conference featuring panel discussions, networking opportunities, presentations, and debates on building resilience in tourism.
The Ministry of Tourism and the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC) said the two-day event will begin on Friday.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness will address the conference on Saturday, with the inaugural Global Tourism Resilience Awards scheduled for later in the evening.
Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett told reporters that the first day of the conference will be dedicated to academic and other thought-leadership discussions and discourses.
“The second day will be dedicated to discussions on tourism resilience. The importance of that day …that the United Nations (UN) has designated as Global Tourism Resilience Day.
“Jamaica is particularly proud of this designation, as it is because of our Prime Minister’s speech to the UN in September of last year calling for a Global Tourism Resilience Day, [which] followed my presentation to the UN… on the 6th of February 2023, at which 94 countries immediately supported and co-sponsored the resolution,” Bartlett said.
He said Jamaica is the second developing country that has enabled a date to be established globally for any discipline or economic or social activity. For World Global Tourism Resilience Day, there will be discussions on education and tourism to explore the prospect of establishing a Caribbean Tourism Academy.
The UN Tourism Executive Secretary, Natalia Bayona, will also discuss with the HEART/NSTA Trust, the Jamaica Centre for Tourism Innovation (JCTI), and several academics, including GTRCMC Director Professor Lloyd Waller.
“They’ll be visiting the Centre at the University of the West Indies, and this is going to be a significant development for Caribbean tourism, not just for Jamaica, because the power of the human capital is what we must leverage for our wealth,” said Bartlett, noting that as the world changes, it will require new skills, “and so the traditional… what we call casual work that has characterized tourism over the years, is going.
“Much of that casual work will be replaced by machine intelligence, and the power of people to manipulate machine intelligence will create relevance. We must be at the cutting edge of it, and this government knows that. This is why education transformation is an integral part of our policy direction.
“Tourism has to continue. It’s the only industry in the world that will survive every technological advance,” Bartlett said.
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