Weatern Bureau: The inaugural winner of the Air Jamaica Vacations/Jamaica Tourist Board survey, which is aimed at getting cruise ship passengers to return to the island as land-based visitors, is Robert Davenport of Illinois.

He has won two round trip tickets on Air Jamaica, and a weeklong stay at Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay.

It is estimated that 50,000 visitors come to Montego Bay by ship every year and if the ongoing programme can lure even a fraction of that figure into hotel rooms, that would provide a significant boost to the occupancy levels.

Ocho Rios has now adopted the programme, which was first launched in Montego Bay.

Under the programme, departing cruise ship passengers are asked to complete a questionnaire that provides information that is fed into a database later used by Air Jamaica Vacations and the JTB to lure them back to the island.

Air Jamaica supplies the tickets while Sandals Royal Caribbean and SuperClubs supply the rooms in Montego Bay and Ocho Rios respectively.

“Without Sandals and Air Jamaica it couldn’t happen (in Montego Bay), and I must also commend the cruise lines without whose support it couldn’t happen. This happened because those people agreed to make it happen,” said manager of the Montego Bay cruise ship terminal, David Lindo, before the inaugural drawing.

Air Jamaica Vacations will contact the Illinois man who came away with the first prize and offer him round trip tickets to the island plus a one-week vacation at Sandals Royal Caribbean.

And pointing to the need for players in the cruise ship and hotel industry to work together, Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association president, Josef Forstmayr, has thrown his full support behind the thrust to convert cruise ship passengers to land-based visitors.

“(The cruise ship industry is) a very powerful part of the industry so, therefore, we must find ways of accommodating it and growing it without impacting, necessarily, on our land based hotel product,” he said.

He was speaking with the Observer after the inaugural drawing.

“We’re looking forward to having a strong partnership,” the tourism head added.

There has been some degree of competition between the two sectors of the industry over the years, with hoteliers worried that the floating hotels would cut into their market. But according to Forstmayr, the realistic approach is to work together instead of against each other.

According to the results of research conducted by Pricewaterhousecoopers in the first three months of 2000, cruise ship passengers spent almost US$17 million in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, with another $4.3 million generated by the crew.