Stopover visitor arrivals to Jamaica jumped 39.5 percent to 970,435 for the first nine months of 2021, from 695,721 in the first nine months last year and is 52 percent below the 2,020,508 stopovers arrivals in the first nine months of 2019.
Tourism is Jamaica’s bouncing back.
September quarter arrivals grew to 437,890 from 114,402 last year but are 30.5 down on the 629,825 in 2019, a significant improvement over the 45.6 percent drop in the June quarter over 2019.
Preliminary data show that the improvement in arrivals continued into October and November, with the latter figures suggesting that the decline against 2019 is now down to just 22 percent.
For Jamaica, stopover arrivals in September this year fell 30.4 percent to 100,654 from 144,583 in September 2019 but are 251 percent ahead of the 28,648 arrivals in September last year, shortly after the industry reopened to international visitors. Data from the Jamaica Tourist Board show that the September numbers are 34.4 percent lower than the 153,360 stopovers in August.
Unfortunately, the Jamaica Tourist Board continues the bad practice of not releasing arrivals numbers to the public on a timely basis. Accordingly, neither October nor November numbers are yet released. The tourist board should move to a two-pronged approach to releasing the data. First, they should provide the country with the arrival numbers and later release the report as they currently do.
