KINGSTON, Jamaica – As Jamaica’s tourism sector continues to recover at pace, the Canadian office of the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) is now focused on increasing its seat capacity into Jamaica to pre-pandemic levels.

Regional director at the JTB Toronto office in Canada, Angella Bennett, gave the assurance during a recent visit to the island, when she led a team of 20 of the top Canadian travel agents for the week-long Jamaica Irie Hour programme. Bennett said increasing the numbers out of Canada, Jamaica’s second largest tourism market, would be their primary goal for 2023.

“We want to get back to 2019 levels. We are about 100,000 arrivals short of 2019 and so our recent trip will help us to solidify those bookings and to get our numbers to 2019 figures, which was approximately 395,000 seats into Jamaica,” Bennett remarked.

She said, however, that while the plan is to increase the numbers for next year, the JTB Toronto team, headed by her, is still working to get more travellers out of Canada to visit Jamaica by the end of this year.

“For now, we are focusing on this winter. We have secured approximately 180,000 seats into Jamaica so far and we are hoping to increase that number by an additional 67,000 to reach our target,” Bennett explained.

She is confident that the group of 20 top performing agents who were part of the Jamaica Irie Hour programme, along with the remaining 2,300 additional travel agents spread across the Canadian land mass who specialise in selling Jamaican packaged holidays, will help in making this fete a reality.

The agents had been meeting virtually during the novel coronavirus pandemic on a fortnightly basis to implement strategies in selling Jamaica as a choice destination to the Canadian travel market. To date, the JTB office has been utilising the virtual meetings to interact with the travel agents.

And with the Canadian government recently lifting all COVID-19 travel restrictions, this is a signal that Canadians could most likely be filling the shores of the island for their holidays.

This latest batch of 20 Canadian agents, complement 50 others who had participated in the Jamaica Irie Hour programme last October. It aims to give the agents a firsthand experience of the Jamaican tourism product, so they are better able to sell Jamaica to their clientele.

The 2,300 strong Canadian travel agents have been selected by the JTB as part of the Tourism Strategic Recovery programme to assist in bringing Jamaica’s earnings from tourism to pre-pandemic levels and beyond.