BOB MOWAT
If you were wondering why Donovan White was smiling during his recent mid-June visit to Canada, wonder no longer.
The Jamaica Tourist Board’s director of tourism was well pleased by the rebound of the Canadian market to the popular Caribbean destination during the first quarter of 2023.
White told Travel Courier that to the end of March, Jamaica had welcomed 177,000 Canadian visitors, almost doubling the 95,000 Canadians it had received during the same period in 2022.
That huge, first quarter upswing sees Canada accounting for a 15% market share of Jamaica’s visitors, which is about what it accounted for pre-pandemic.
And Canada’s performance for Jamaica is all the more remarkable considering that it was slow to reopen or, perhaps more accurately, it reopened in fits and starts.
Looking ahead to the summer (May to August), White reports that there are 136,000 air seats committed to Jamaica, which is a significant increase over the 76,000 that were committed for the same time in 2022.
“That’s a huge growth difference in terms of the confidence of the airline partners in the destination,” the JTB’s director of tourism observed.
While the results are better than expected, White is also keenly aware that competition in the market is at a fever-pitch these days. So, the obvious question is how Jamaica is differentiating its offerings from the competition.
“We’ve always differentiated ourselves by focusing on the critical characteristics of the destination — those being culture, entertainment, romance, people and food,” White said.
The most significant of those, said White, is people, explaining: “We have, as Jamaicans, hospitality in our DNA. That allows visitors, when they are in-country, to have a kind of experience that they never bargained for simply because they come in contact with the Jamaican people.”
And he added: “That’s something that you can’t package and sell. You just know that we will deliver a kind of service that is world class and it is part of the reason why our return rate of visitors being upwards of 42% is as high and has been as high for as long as it has been.”
Asked about challenges beyond the industry’s competitive environment these days, White was quick to point to labour shortages.
“I think that the industry has had to overcome several challenges, and still is overcoming several challenges. One of them being the critical labour force issue that is being faced by the industry globally. Coming out of COVID, close to 20% of the workforce didn’t come back to the industry and you don’t replace 20% of the workforce if you don’t have a pipeline of workers being prepped to come into the industry.”
As White sees it “one of the critical challenges that I believe the industry faces now, and probably will face for the short- to medium-term future, is how to upskill. First of all, how to recruit talent for the industry and then secondly, how do we begin to build the capacity needed to train, upskill that talent for the industry.”
White pointed out that: “Jamaica, for our own part, has – through the direction of our Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett – really focused on driving this aspect of the destination recovery from COVID-19 and so, the Jamaican Centre for Tourism Innovation – which is a training institute, under the Tourism Enhancement Fund — has been hard at work defining and writing curriculum for training, recruiting in the destination for potential workers to be trained and have, in fact, trained something over 300 people already over the last year or so.”
And he added: “We’ve been very active and trying to be visionaries in this area of recovery because we [understood] very early the effects it can have on the service delivery to our guests and therefore, what that can do for future business.”
With every challenge, there comes opportunity, and it seems that Jamaica is finding that opportunity is knocking these days.
White told TC that one of the opportunities that Jamaica is seeing is “the level of confidence that the investment community has shown in Jamaica post-COVID. We have a number of new hotel and other hospitality type projects that are in train at the moment.”
He continued: “Princess Hotels is being built, opening by early next year (2024 — that’s a 2,000-room hotel. I think the first 1,000 rooms will be open in February of next year. Sandals Dunn’s River just returned to the Sandals’ product fold about three weeks ago, they reopened that property – a swanky new property that if you haven’t had a chance to experience it, I daresay you should sometime soon.”
As well, he said that: “The Hard Rock Group is currently building their Unico brand in Montego Bay that I believe is slated for opening sometime this time next year — round about May or June next year — which will be a brand-new brand in Jamaica.”
Plus, the director said that: “RIU is currently building an 800-room hotel in Falmouth Trelawny. We have commitments from two existing, large partners – Grand Palladium and Bahia Principe – on expansion of their current plant over the next two to three years.”
Said White: “So, there is a significant amount of investor confidence in the hospitality space in Jamaica and there’s at least another 15 projects that are signed off and being developed to be announced and for groundbreaking to take place in different parts of Jamaica; which is also the other thing which is interesting about the opportunities is that we are beginning to seed interest right across Jamaica… Kingston, Portland, St Mary, St. Thomas — our parishes that are not typically considered destination points in Jamaica.”
And he concluded: “What we’re seeing is a renaissance of the Jamaican economy – more of a tourism economy – where the macro economic dependence on tourism and hospitality is becoming more and more evident and therefore allowing for the investment community to seek and seed new opportunities in places in Jamaica where typically they might not have before.”
