MINISTER of Tourism Edmund Bartlett is confident that after blazing a path of success, despite numerous challenges in 2024, the sector is poised to do even better this year.

According to Bartlett, the current winter season — which started on December 15 and runs until April 15 — is shaping up to be strong and is expected to see a minimum of 1.3 million visitors and earnings of some US$1.5 billion which will set the tone for a bumper 2025.

“The performance in December represented a recovery from the fallout that we had as a result of Hurricane Beryl, the reduction in airlift into the country, the [US] travel advisories, and adverse weather conditions that prevailed in the months of October and November.

“The recovery is going to be even stronger January through to March and will enable a very strong fourth quarter for the economy overall,” Bartlett told the Jamaica Observer on Friday as he pointed to recent reports from the Planning Institute of Jamaica and the Statistical Institute of Jamaica that showed the economy contracted sharply in the July-September quarter of 2024.

“The expectation is full recovery [of the tourism sector] for the winter, with growth of 13 per cent, which will see a resumption of the growth path for the economy overall,” added Bartlett.

He underscored that the performance of the cruise sector was stronger than expected last year, with just over 1.25-million visitors coming to the nation’s ports. This is projected to increase to more than 1.4-million visitors in 2025.

The tourism minister said with the growth in the sector to continue well into this year, efforts to build the human capacity in the industry will be increased.

“Our training programmes are going to be escalated during the period, and we have already trained and certified more than 20,000 workers in the industry since the establishment of the Jamaica Centre of Tourism Innovation in 2017, and that has augured well for quality of our labour force. We have also enabled a level of portability of Jamaica workers all across the United States and the rest of the Caribbean. That augurs well for us also in terms of remittances that come in,” said Bartlett.

He told the Observer that Jamaica is also seeing a renaissance in the environment of the labour force, which is being carefully studied and planned for.

“All new investors are coming in with housing components [for tourism workers] to their portfolios and we are breaking ground for three mega hotels in the first quarter of this year. We anticipate that [the US$1-billion] Harmony Cove [development in Trelawny] will come on stream towards the second or third quarter of the year and we are expecting the first casino to be opened in November,” Bartlett said.

He pointed to some of the success stories in the sector last year which, he said, included the strong show of confidence in Jamaica by investors. That includes the completion of approximately 2,000 new rooms, he said, and argued that significant strides are being made towards the ambitious target of adding 20,000 rooms within the next 10 to 15 years.

Among the major developments recently opened are the 753-room Riu Aquarelle in Trelawny and the 1,000-room Princess Grand and Princess Senses The Mangrove resort in Hanover.

There was also an increase in airlift from several major destinations, with American Airlines starting its inaugural non-stop flight from Miami to Ian Fleming International Airport in Boscobel, St Mary. United Airlines also announced that there had been a 50 per cent increase in flights to Jamaica since 2019, while Avelo Airlines’ new direct flights connecting Hartford, Connecticut, in the United States with Montego Bay started on November 16.

LATAM, Latin America’s largest airline, also resumed non-stop flights between Lima, Peru, and Montego Bay on December 1, while World2Fly is set to begin rotations in Summer 2025 from Lisbon, Portugal, to Montego Bay.