Jamaica’s Tourism Minister, Edmund Bartlett, says the island’s stopover arrivals have grown by 6 percent over the summer, setting a new record.
The minister told reporters at a press briefing at the Ministry of Tourism’s New Kingston office that 2018 has been the best summer ever, as the island has received 884,324 visitors compared to the 834,292 from the period of May to August in 2017.
He says the earnings up to the end of August are more than $2 billion. For the first two-thirds of the year, expenditure from tourists is $2.2 billion.
Between January and August of this year, the island took in more than 2,900,000 visitors, an increase of over four percent over the same period last year. This figure consisted of 1,714,060 stop over arrivals and 1,240,947 cruise visitors.
The minister says the projections made for growth last year was five percent per annum for five years. Last year, it was 12 percent.
He says his ministry is striving to add on to the numbers of 2017, totaling 4.7 million visitors. The increase from 2016 was slightly over 12 percent, with a $3 billion US dollar revenue. In 2017, for the first time in the island nation’s history, Jamaica attained over 500,000 new visitors in a single calendar year.
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