ECONOMY-JAMAICA: Tourism Struggles with Legacy of Violence

By Zadie Neufville Reprint | | Print |

Zadie Neufville

KINGSTON, Jul 23 2001 (IPS) - Officials are going all out to repair damage to the country’s reputation as a tourist destination after this month’s political violence.

At least 27 people were killed and 40 injured in running gun battles between security forces and rival gangs in the traditionally violent west end of this capital city. Simmering conflict broke out into full-scale fighting Jul 7 and was brought under control only after Prime Minister PJ Patterson called out the entire army, 3,000-plus soldiers, Jul 9.

Thirteen of those who died in the confrontations were buried this weekend. Other funerals await the arrival of relatives overseas or the completion of autopsies.

Even before the rotting corpses were cleared from the city’s streets, industry analysts predicted falling visitor arrivals during the upcoming autumn and winter tourism seasons – traditionally, peak periods for the island’s hotels and tour operators.”

This would be a significant blow to an industry that has begun to post growth only in the past two years, having missed a tourism boom that its Caribbean neighbours enjoyed for much of the 1990s.

So, in response, the government and private sector are mounting Operation Grow, a plan to ratchet up Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) efforts to sell the country abroad. The board is launching advertising, public relations and marketing initiatives as far away as Japan, even as government pulls heavy duty machinery from infrastructure and construction projects to help clean up Kingston.

Already, there are live radio and television broadcasts from the country’s far-flung resorts and in coming weeks travel writers, tour operators and travel agents will begin arriving to “see first hand that the country is still open for business,” says Trevor Riley, JTB’s deputy director for local communications and marketing.

The government also is asking the US, German, British and other diplomatic missions here not to paint too grim a picture in the travel advisories they issue to their citizens.

At a Cabinet meeting last week, Tourism Minister Portia Simpson- Miller asked for 20 million dollars to fund a recovery campaign including those junkets. The figure is nearly ten times the JTB budget of 2.1 million dollars. But it falls some 10 million dollars short of the amount needed to reach all current and potential markets, according to Gordon “Butch” Stewart, chairman of the Sandals Group of resorts.

Fay Pickersgill, Jamaica’s tourism director, wrote a letter to travel businesses last week telling them the island is safe. “This disturbance has been a localized domestic matter, primarily confined to certain parts of Kingston,” she wrote. It “has not in any way affected our visitors.”

Pickersgill admits Jamaica is a hard sell – and that media images and reports of this month’s gun battles have badly affected an industry already hobbled by an increasing crime rate, tourist harassment, and foreign exchange rates that make it one of the most expensive Caribbean destinations for European travelers. Even before the latest wave of violence, a crime wave had claimed more than 500 lives this year.

Tourism generates 45 percent of Jamaica’s foreign exchange earnings and provides one in four jobs.

Even as they move to head off a new calamity, tourism officials and executives are haunted by memories of 1999, when riots against fuel price hikes resulted in 30 million dollars worth of cancelled bookings in the resorts of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios.

“It takes so much to recover and it is so discouraging when we have to go back to partners to try and reassure them that as far as the tourism centres are concerned, nothing is happening'” says Pickersgill.

Montego Bay’s newest hotel, the Ritz Carlton, reported a loss of more than one million dollars after news of this month’s gun battles and pictures of dead bodies in Kingston’s streets began to appear in the international media and were posted on the Internet by the opposition Jamaica Labour Party.

At the height of the unrest, 38,813 viewers of the US-based Cable News Network (CNN) were asked whether they would consider vacationing in Jamaica. Close to 90 per cent said no.

Before the troubles, officials had projected some 2.26 million visitors this year – a modest goal that seemed well within reach despite signs of a slowing US economy. Now, even that goal is considered shaky.

Jamaica’s new problems come at a time when the country had launched initiatives to catch up with Caribbean competitors that also are spending more to shore up their industries.

Several multi-billion-dollar road improvement projects were assembled to kick-start economic growth, cut time traveling between towns and resorts, and improve access to tourist attractions. Ten million dollars have been committed to upgrade private aircraft facilities at Montego Bay’s international airport.

Negril, a western resort town known for its seven miles of white sand beaches, in May unveiled a multimillion-dollar programme to market itself in Latin and North America and Europe.

Tour operators and taxi drivers in Ocho Rios, fearful of losing cruise ship passengers, organised themselves to clamp down on the harassment of tourists by taxi drivers.

Ocho Rios has had its share of problems. Just last month Dunns River Falls, a famous whitewater rafting attraction, was closed and tours were cancelled because security forces had put up roadblocks to contain demonstrations against the demolition of 28 squatter dwellings.