The first Global Tourism Resilience Day will be hosted by Jamaica on February 15, 2023, at the regional headquarters of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Mona.
Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett said the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre, which is established at the UWI in Jamaica and has six satellite centers in six countries across the world, will be inaugurating the event.
It will be held in collaboration with the Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), the World Travel Awards, the International Tourism Investment Conference, and the Global Tourism Resilience Council of London.
“That event will be celebrated in the frame of a global resilience conference that will consist of three parts and will cover three days beginning the 15th of February and that will be dedicated to the investment forum,” Bartlett announced Wednesday night during the CTO’s “Destination Media Briefing” held as part of activities for the CTO Business Meetings and Caribbean Aviation Day Event, which ends on Thursday.
The minister said the international tourism investment conference will be responsible for the investment forum, which will bring investors from across the world to the Caribbean. Also, it will be an opportunity for Caribbean investors to look at prospects for tourism investment in the region.
The second day, February 16, will see the hosting of the first Caribbean-African Tourism Forum and at least ten African ministers of tourism will collaborate with the ministers of the CTO “as we look at ways and means to join Africa and the Caribbean in a tourism convergence first in history”.
Bartlett said Kenya, is host of one of the tourism resilience centers, at the Kenyatta University in Nairobi and covers eastern Africa, as well as Rwanda, Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, and South Africa are expected to attend the event.
“And then within the Indian Ocean realm, which is pretty close to Africa and is sometimes called the Africa, Seychelles, the Maldives,” Bartlett said, adding that the Maldivian minister of foreign affairs who is also the president of the UN General Assembly, visited Jamaica last weekend.
He said a delegation of Caribbean ministers will be taken to Saudi Arabia in November to meet with their counterparts there who we already have an MOU with, and we’ll be working with the GCC mega airlines.
“February 15 to 17 is going to be a major period for Caribbean tourism. And Jamaica is particularly honored to provide the setting for it. And the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre, in particular, would be a forum that will enable this powerful discourse between Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and the Caribbean,” Bartlett added.
The Jamaica tourism minister said the conference is especially important if regional tourism is not only to recover to but grow beyond 2019 levels.
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