KINGSTON, Jamaica — Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett, is set to meet with stakeholders on Thursday to examine the industry’s needs and opportunities, given the significant growth taking place in sector.

According to a release on Wednesday, the meeting comes as the sector remains on track to add 20,000 new hotel rooms over the next 10 to 15 years, with nearly 3,000 new rooms to come on stream this year.

“So, think of the demand now that this creates,” Bartlett said, adding that the meeting with the tourism stakeholders will explore what the additional rooms “means for human capital development, for skills and for training and more importantly, what it means for our local production capacity, because we’re going to have to do more in 2024”.

Bartlett was addressing Tuesday’s launch of the Blue Mountain Coffee Festival at Devon House.

The seventh staging of the event is scheduled for Saturday, March 2 at Newcastle in St Andrew.

Bartlett shared that three million stopover visitors are expected this year.

“Three million tourists in a country of 2.8 million people means that for the first time the real flow-through effect of the tourism dollar is going to be felt by a larger and larger portion of the population,” he noted.

The tourism minister pointed out that with 73 per cent of tourists to Jamaica coming from the world’s top coffee-consuming country, the United States of America, there are opportunities for increasing production capacity, investment in coffee, tourism and its linkages.