Jamaica Tourist Board targets 7% growth in the sector by 2025

In this context, Travel2latam spoke with Donovan White, Director of Tourism of the Jamaica Tourist Board.

What are your expectations for being present at Fitur?

Fitur is always a great opportunity for us. First, it is the beginning of the year, so it sets the tone in terms of what is happening in the market, it gives us a good idea of ​​what our partners and competitors are doing, and it also allows us to interact with our partners from around the world who are here, in terms of how we align with them for the coming year.

So it's always a very strategic place to be, and we're happy to be here. Fitur is bigger than ever this year, very busy, which is great for business, for travel. 

Airlines, cruise lines and hoteliers are present, so it's possible that they will have some meetings to make investments in Jamaica, right? 

Absolutely, as always. We have most of our Spanish investors here. We have had great meetings with them throughout the week, and we continue to grow our portfolio with them. There are already several expansions and new investments being discussed, which I cannot comment on yet, but it is safe to say that our business with the Spanish investors is very secure. We are always working to drive growth.

Can you give us some details about the main news you are presenting here?

We have showcased Jamaica in all its glory. Last year was really good, we didn't grow, but we remained stable in growth in a record year like 2023, even with all the challenges we had from the beginning of the year to the aircraft challenges with airlines not being able to deliver their planes or the hurricanes. So, for us to remain stable in our numbers was a great sign of resilience. Our team worked very hard in a very difficult year and is preparing for growth this year.

We anticipate that with all the plans we have, we should grow by about 6% or 7% in arrivals, and about the same in revenue. We are very focused on Europe and Latin America for incremental growth. And we are looking to the United States for continued growth.

We are in Spain today, but there will be a lot of events during the season. Could you tell us some of them that you are planning? 

Our next big event will be in Colombia, at NATO. Then we go to Sao Paulo for WTM. We also have ITB in Germany, and ATM in Dubai. That rounds out the first half of the year. Then we have CHTA in Antigua. We will use the first half of the year to evaluate what happens in the second. Of course, we will have JAPEX in Jamaica in September. We will have in October the Jamaica Travel Market in London, which is our own event in the UK market. That leads us to WTM in London in November, and it sort of rounds out the year in terms of big events. 

But, there are a couple of new opportunities that we are looking at that we want to stay focused on because these are incremental growth in specific markets, and we want to stay focused on those and make sure we hit our targets.

You work with many Caribbean destinations, but you have the challenge of being competitors. So, how do you work internally in those terms? 

CTO has its own goal, which is to present the Caribbean as an attractive region for travel in the world. And as directors of that organization, we are all tied into that, to see the growth of the Caribbean in a holistic way. As competitors, we are positioning ourselves to ensure that as growth comes to the region, each of us is uniquely presented to take advantage of it.

So as we work together at the CTO level for the region, we need to separate out the uniqueness of each of our destinations to ensure that when travelers are looking to come to the Caribbean, they have all the information they need to make a good decision.