Visitor Arrivals to hit 3 Millon Mark before Year-End – Assamba
September 29, 2006The Full Story
Minister of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture, Aloun Ndombet Assamba is optimistic that with the combination of cruise ship and stopover arrivals, the industry “will hit the three million mark before the end of the year”.
The Tourism Minister was addressing a World Tourism Day press conference on Wednesday (Sept. 27) at the Jamaica Tourist Board in Kingston.
She noted that January to August was a record-breaking period, with Jamaica receiving 1,213,807 stopover visitors and 871,627 cruise passengers, which represented increases of 17.7 and 15.2 per cent respectively, over the same period in 2005. Stopover arrivals for the month of August reached a high of 141,631, reflecting a 20 per cent increase over the 117,898 arrivals recorded for the same month in 2005.
Mrs. Assamba credited the remarkable increase to the growth in arrivals from major markets including Canada, United States of America and Europe.
There was a 57.6 per cent growth in arrivals from Canada during August, when almost 10,000 Canadians made stopover visits to the island compared with over 6,300 in August 2005. Stopover arrivals from the United States market increased by almost 19 per cent, while the number of visitors from Europe went up by 15 per cent to record more than 98,300 and 25,600 stopover visitors from the respective destinations.
As it relates to cruise passenger arrivals, Jamaica experienced a 30.9 per cent increase with 99,000 cruise passengers coming to the island compared with 75,500 in August 2005.
Turning to room stock, Minister Assamba pointed out that there are 23,000 rooms in the inventory and come March 2007, an additional 2,000 should be available.
September 27 is observed each year by the World Tourism Organization as World Tourism Day. This year’s theme was: ‘Tourism Enriches.’
The purpose of the day is to increase awareness about the importance of tourism to the international community and to show how the sector impacts social, cultural, political and economic values worldwide.