WE are pleased at news that Jamaica is projected to welcome more than one million visitors from the United States for the upcoming winter tourist season. Add to that bookings from Europe and other parts of the world — particularly the United Kingdom and Canada which, we are told, are looking strong — and Jamaica is in for a super bumper winter tourist season.

That is a massive statement of traveller confidence in Jamaica, which speaks volumes for our marketing, promotional, and advertising campaigns. It is also a declaration from the trade that Jamaica’s place as one of the finest travel brands in the world remains firm.

Last week, Tourism Minister Mr Edmund Bartlett noted that 10 airlines have 5,914 flights booked out of key US gateways to Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay and Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston between January and April 2024, adding to the flurry expected over the 2023 Christmas holiday period.

The airlines include American, with 305,436 seats booked on 1,727 flights; Southwest, with 106,925 seats on 611 flights; Delta, with 205,776 seats on 1,119 flights; JetBlue, with a total of 242,347 seats on 1,434 flights; United, booking 92,911 seats on 525 flights; and Frontier flying in with 25,482 seats on 137 flights. Additionally, Spirit, Sun Country, and ALG Charter have a combined 65,677 seats on 361 flights, while airlift is also scheduled to come from Caribbean Airlines out of New York.

As we have pointed out before in this space, attracting that volume of business is extremely hard and unending work, because Jamaica is competing with many other destinations across the world for a slice of the global tourism pie.

No praise, therefore, is too huge for the industry’s stakeholders who are responsible for this impressive performance. We speak here of the operators of hotels, villas, apartments and attractions, the Jamaica Tourist Board, the tourism ministry, and our overseas travel trade partners.

Kudos must also be extended to workers at all levels in the industry whose hospitable disposition has no doubt encouraged visitors to recommend Jamaica to their family and friends. That those workers now stand to benefit from the coming winter season is indeed fitting, as they are among this country’s greatest ambassadors.

The latest data from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) show that an estimated 975 million tourists travelled internationally between January and September 2023, an increase of 38 per cent over the same months in 2022.

Those figures, the UNWTO said, show that international tourism is on track to recover almost 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by the end of this year.

This is an industry that is growing, and every effort should be made to ensure that the entire country continues to benefit from that growth.

That will require us making sure that our country is safe, first for us as Jamaicans, as that will redound to the benefit of our visitors; and that we continue extending to our guests the type of warm welcome for which Jamaicans are known internationally and which contributed significantly to Jamaica reinforcing its credentials as a tourism powerhouse by winning World’s Leading Family Destination and World’s Leading Cruise Destination at the World Travel Awards last week in Dubai.