Although having to backtrack on his growth strategy prediction that Jamaica would welcome five million visitors this year and earn US$5 billion, dubbed ‘5×5 by 2025’, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett believes the goal is still achievable by another year. 

“By the end of 2025, and that was my dream with the 5x5x5, but you know the best laid plans by mice and men are often interrupted by vermins that we don’t know about, and we will not say it anymore than that, so we may have to just potract that a year or so, but we are expecting still to have five million visitors to Jamaica and to earn US$5 billion in turn,” Bartlett said on May 22, while giving his address at the Jamaica Tourist Board’s (JTB) 70th anniversary celebration which was held on the east lawns of Devon House in St Andrew. 

“So that will be, in fact, a 50-fold increase in visitor arrivals since 1955 [when the JTB started],” he added. 

When the JTB was established, Jamaica was merely an emerging destination and perceived as a place for vacations by the wealthy and as a playground for the rich and the famous. In 1955, the country was welcoming just over 100,000 visitors annually. Now, after seven decades, Jamaica stands as a global tourism powerhouse, welcoming some 4.27 million visitors and generating approximately US$4.35 billion in earnings in 2024.

This represents a 5.3 per cent increase in arrivals and a 3.3 per cent rise in revenue compared to 2023.

He added that these numbers tell a compelling story of resilience and growth about the country’s tourism industry, especially after the untrapause and ultrapulse from COVID-19, and three mega disruptions. 

Prior to the pandemic, Jamaica achieved record-breaking successes with visitor arrivals reaching unprecedented heights. Then came the global shutdown, a challenge unlike any faced before, and existential threat that Earth had experienced.  

He recalled how the vulnerability of the Jamaican tourist industry came to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the country was able to return to normalcy with the help of the research institute called the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre. 

“Two years before the COVID-19, established for the world, a Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre at the University of the West Indies, and when we did that, we then went to Nairobi in Kenya and established a similar one at the Kenyatta University in December 2019, and then we did five more across the world in Jordan and Toronto at George Brown, at Bournemouth University in the UK, and now we’re going to have one in Dubai in the Emirates, because the Minister [Helal] Almarri has indicated that they will have a resilience centre as a satellite from Jamaica in Dubai in short order,” Bartlett said. 

“But, the more important point we want to make from this, was the level of thought leadership that Jamaica provided to the world during that most existential threat,” he said.  

Bartlett also gave credit to the JTB for their work during the pandemic, which has resulted in the 4.27 million visitors that were realised last year.  

“I want to give credit to the Tourist Board during that period, for the kind of work that they did in telling the story [about Jamaica] and telling it well, and how we were able to embrace the technologies that were useful to take the message across to the world in graphic form, and also to show the level of innovation that had attended our process, so that we were able to marry virtually, 140 couples at Laughing Waters, and then invite those couples to come to Jamaica when COVID is over and have their honeymoon,” Bartlett said. 

“So, in two and a half years after COVID, from a zero position, we welcome a record 4.3 million visitors and earned US$4.35 billion for Jamaica,” he said, to which the audience applauded.

With regards to the reduction in the poverty rate that was recently announced, Bartlett alluded to the growth in tourism after the pandemic ended. 

“Tourism grew exponentially during those two years and brought back 175,000 workers into active earnings, and so it is all of those things that enure to the reduction of poverty and so it’s a real reduction, and I believe that as the prime minister said today somewhere else, the ambition is to take it to zero in time, and we can do it as a country and Usain will help us to do that,”mused the minister. 

Jamaica just shattered tourism records with a remarkable 25 per cent year-over-year increase in Caribbean visitor arrivals, and the two-year growth story is even more compelling at 75.9 per cent.

In an effort to bring domestic tourist arrivals to the five million mark, the JTB appointed retired sprinting legend Usain Bolt as Jamaica’s global ambassador for tourism last Thursday .

Bolt is expected to make his first appearance next week as an ambassador in New York, when the JTB celebrates its 70th anniversary in the Big Apple, which has a high population of immigrants from the island of Jamaica. 

“Usain will be there with us throughout to help to build back this great Jamaica’s economy that we know must go to the places that we should,” Bartlett said.