Cruise Shipping Industry Being Repositioned

Tourism Minister, Hon. Edmund Bartlett, says Jamaica’s cruise shipping industry is being repositioned to better enable it to generate significantly higher earnings.

This, he says, is aimed at ensuring that the tourism industry is able to record the US$5 billion in annual earnings being targeted to materialize by 2021.

Mr. Bartlett made the announcement while speaking at the Ministry’s linkages network strategy session at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in New Kingston on Wednesday, August 10.

The Minister said while cruise ship visitor arrivals grew by 14.3 per cent over the first six months of the year, compared to 2.5 per cent for stopovers, “we only earned US$87 million from the 949,000 passengers who came.”
This, Mr, Bartlett said, pales in comparison to the US$1.1 billion earned from the same number of stopover visitor arrivals.

“So, we have to increase the cruise earnings. That’s the challenge (for us) to make that US$5 billion,” he emphasized.

Mr. Bartlett contended that this can be achieved by creating a rich shopping experience for cruise ship visitors that encourages them to spend more.

He noted that while shopping was the second largest tourism attraction globally, “Jamaica lags far behind in terms of earnings” in the region.

The Minister indicated that while the cruise ship visitor-spend in the eastern and south eastern Caribbean averages US$300 per person, the outturn in Jamaica was only US$74. As such he said “we have a long way to go”, to catch up.
To this end, he said the Ministry’s shopping network would be pivotal in ensuring that Jamaica is firmly established as an ideal destination for this engagement.

In noting that the Ministry has “done some good work with shopping in the past”, Mr. Bartlett said they were able to develop an inventory enrichment strategy.

This, he explained, enabled tourism stakeholders to import high-end goods for sale to visitors. He said items not immediately sold would be kept in storage for a period and could subsequently be returned to the supplier if not disposed of within that timeline.

“What we need to do is broaden that inventory enrichment concept to include leather and textile, so that we can bring the big brand names into Jamaica. We also have to look at what kind of policy arrangements we must carve out to enable the expansion and growth of tourism in Jamaica,” Mr Bartlett added.