July Set to Record Highest Arrival Figures

Prime Minister, the Hon. Bruce Golding, has announced that the country is set to record its highest ever visitor arrivals for the month of July.
Mr. Golding said that despite the negative publicity from the State of Emergency, tourist arrival numbers for July are the best the country has ever seen for that month.
He was speaking on his monthly radio programme Jamaica House Live on Wednesday (July 28).
Tourism Minister, Hon. Edmund Bartlett, speaking at a press briefing at his Knutsford Boulevard office in New Kingston earlier that day, confirmed that Jamaica was on the verge of improving the 196,000 stopover figure recorded for July 2009.
“The preliminary count on July 27, we were just slightly ahead of July last year and we’re going into a weekend, and weekends are usually better numbers for us, so chances are we will end the month of July with the best arrival figures ever in Jamaica’s history,” he declared.
The Tourism Minister, however, admitted that the fall and winter tourist periods will pose a challenge to Jamaica’s recovery, following the two-month State of Emergency, but said his team continues to work overtime to ensure a full revival of the market.
“The recovery is on the road and certainly the combination of policies and marketing activities that are being carried out by all of the stakeholders and partners will see us to the end,” he said.
The Prime Minister, in the meantime, noted that Jamaica continues to outshine its Caribbean neighbours in respect to tourist arrival numbers. “It is not by accident that last year, we did better in terms of tourist arrivals than any other country in the Caribbean, including Dominica Republic (and) Mexico. We led the Caribbean,” he said.
“We had a three per cent growth last year, which was the best performance of any CARICOM country and despite the difficulties we had with the unrest that emerged round about the time we had the State of Emergency, we are still cautiously optimistic that we are going to do well again,” he stated.