JAMAICA and the rest of the region are being urged to reform and upgrade communication mechanisms to ensure fast and accurate flow of information between the tourism sector and disaster management agencies.

The call has come from country representative for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and general manager of the bank’s Country Department Caribbean Group Therese Turner-Jones.

She was speaking yesterday at the opening session of a two-day tourism crisis and communication meeting being hosted by the IDB and the Ministry of Tourism at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.

Turner-Jones noted that between The Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean tourism accounts for an average of 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). “That’s a lot of dependence on one industry… it also has a very high impact in terms of employment for the region, so this is an industry that we cannot ignore in a moment of crisis,” she said.

She said the region’s vulnerability, as a result of climate change and the impact of national disasters, is inextricably linked to the tourism product, pointing to the devastating hurricanes of 2017 and 2019 which left a trail of destruction across the region.

The IDB official said while the approximately 26,000 lives that were impacted in The Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian in September may seem small, the economic impact was devastating.

She pointed out that her native country, The Bahamas, suffered an estimated US$3.8 billion in damage, or just under one per cent of GDP.

“This is just the future of what we are going to be seeing more and more frequently in our region, so we have to be prepared,” she stated.

Turner-Jones said, in addition to economic assessments, appropriate information systems are critical planks of preparedness, so that when these events occur governments can communicate properly with hotels, the first line of shelter for visitors.

“What recent disasters show is that there are definite weaknesses in the information systems in some countries, and there needs to be strong efforts to beef that up,” she stated.

Furthermore, she said there is also the issue of damage assessment, replacement, and ensuring that all the hotels and homeowners have the appropriate amount of insurance coverage. She noted, too, the losses of US$215 billion suffered across the sector in 2017, resulted in an estimated loss of 826,000 visitors to the Caribbean, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

“Of that US$215 billion, only US$135 billion was insured for… so we know that these hurricanes are coming, we know that we need to be prepared, and we need to have contingencies as a result,” Turner-Jones said.

She said governments must do a number of things to ensure that information flows in a crisis. This includes investing more in traditional tourism data collection; in the design and conduct of applied and behavioural research; as well as knowledge-gathering to enhance crisis communication, risk reduction, and resilience policies and practices.

“We need to improve tourism crisis communication plans across the region to accommodate multiple disaster scenarios — 2017 was a good example of that, given how many islands were hit,” she said.

Among the major trends that are impacting the future of tourism, she said, is the global digital transformation, which needs to be embraced as part of improving the visitor experience in the region. “I always think about this whenever I land in any Caribbean destination; can I get in a vehicle and can I pay with my debit card? How user- friendly are our countries to having digital payments?”