Jamaica is planning to restart British travel agent familiarisation trips to the destination in April next year.

The familiarisation trips were discontinued due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, which saw a closure of Jamaica’s tourism business last year. The sector has since reopened and is fast gathering momentum. Prior to the pandemic, the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) hosted around 10 familiarisation trips a year for the UK trade, taking around 100 agents to the destination.

JTB) District Sales Manager Torrance Lewis disclosed that the tourism marketing arm is planning to have at least 10 such trips for UK agents next year. He explained the start of the familiarisation trips would have been much earlier but was pushed back when the UK Foreign Office issued an advisory against all non-essential travel to Jamaica at the end of August.

This Lewis admitted delayed a return to familiarisation trips but said the recent removal of this advice and Jamaica’s placement on the amber list meant the destination could now plan for trips to take place. The JTB hopes to reveal familiarisation trip dates by the end of this year with the aim of taking 100 or more agents to visit the country.

According to Lewis, “We’ve always been the leader in familiarisation trips. We want to start doing them again and we have been consulting with airlines.”

He made the point that airlift to Jamaica was returning to pre-pandemic levels this winter season and there are hopes of extra flights being added in 2022. Jamaica is already offering agents double rewards of £10 per booking, up from the normal £5 incentive that it put in place as part of its Jamaica Rewards programme during the pandemic, until the end of the year.

Agents are encouraged to log bookings they make with the tourist board as part of its “Sell it & See it” initiative, which will then help them to qualify for a place on a familiarisation trip.