Jamaica Tourism Shows Growth in Early 2009

The Jamaica Tourist Board is reporting a strong start in tourism arrivals for 2009, with 148,886 total stopover arrivals for January representing an increase of 4.2 percent over the same period in 2008.

For the first month of this year, Jamaica welcomed 80,190 visitors from the United States and just under 40,000 visitors from Canada. Despite the economic downturn, it is worthy of note that the Canadian market experienced witnessed a 37.7 percent increase over January 2008.

Preliminary figures for February 2009 also reflect this growth trend, showing an increase of 1.3 percent. The preliminary figures for the first week of March show a 12.9 percent increase over the corresponding period last year.

Last year, Jamaica experienced a 3.9 percent growth in stopover arrivals, with a total of 1,769,271 visitors. Of that number 1,150,942 came from the United States, Jamaica’s primary source market.