THREE million tourists, most of them escaping the icy chill of the northern climes, visited Jamaica last year to soak up the sun, sand and sea, setting two new records in the process, officials announced yesterday.

“For the first time in history, we have two records that we are breaking. One is that we have a million passengers from a single market (North East United States) in one calendar year; but we also in one calendar year have more than three million visitors,” Tourism Minister Aloun Assamba told reporters at a press briefing at the Jamaica Tourist Board offices in Kingston.

Giving a breakdown of the figures, Assamba said there were 1,680,642 stop-over passengers, representing a 13 per cent increase over the corresponding period in 2005 when there were 1.478 million stop-over visitors.

She also noted that there were 1,334,441 cruise passengers, which represents a 17.5 per cent increase compared with the previous year.

“That makes the total of 3,015,873 passengers, up by 15.3 per cent over 2005. This is the second year running that we have had our cruise passengers being over one million passengers and that is a 24 per cent increase in earnings to us over 2005,” said the upbeat tourism minister.

“We don’t have any record of any other English-speaking destination on this kind of growth in our region,” Assamba glowed.

Meanwhile, Director of Tourism Basil Smith said earnings in the sector amounted to approximately US$1.9 billion last year, a likely record too.

The performance comes against worrying crime figures, including escalating murders in the main tourist resort of Montego Bay, which has seen an unprecedented rise in killings.

That, apparently, has not reduced the visitors’ appetite for cavorting in the warm, blue water of the Caribbean Sea which laps the shores of the island.

At the same time, Assamba was also upbeat about the current winter season, noting that given the forward booking tallies, the tourism sector was expecting “an excellent winter and a very buoyant summer”.

She also told reporters that the opening of hotels on the North Coast had been a big boost for the tourism sector.

“The additional room means additional jobs and it also means additional commercial activity between Jamaican producers of goods and services and the hotels that are being erected,” she said.

“In fact, yesterday I had a discussion with an egg farmer out of Trelawny, who tells me that he is doing five times the amount of business with Bahia Principe than he is doing with some of the other hotels he has been delivering eggs to prior to this.”

Assamba, giving an update on the Spanish-owned hotel, said since the soft opening of the Bahia Principe Resort on December 21 last year, there are now 549 of its 600 rooms in operation, and as of Monday night, the resort had 890 guests in house.

“These guests come from a spread of markets – Spain, Portugal, Canada and the United States,” she explained. “In fact a charter came in from Portugal and Spain on December 26 with 240 guests.”