In Defence of Tourism

Tourism is big business and a big driver for many Caribbean economies. But the heavy economic losses resulting from the shuttering of the sector during the COVID pandemic has amplified existing calls to diversify regional economies, and in some cases created new ones arguing that countries in the region should deprioritise it.

But Adam Stewart, Executive Chairman of Sandals Resorts International says that people underestimate the true contribution of the sector. “I think there’s a misunderstanding of the true economic impact of tourism. Tourism has direct, indirect, and induced attribution to its impact on the economy.”

Using Jamaica, his organisation’s home base, as an example, Stewart first pointed to the sector’s contribution to international reserves, but asserted that it went far beyond that.

“Tourism employs people directly within the resorts; tourism pays taxes, tourism employs entertainers; it employs ministers and priests that officiate weddings; it buys from the local hardware store; it buys most importantly from probably agriculture and manufacturing at large… In Jamaica, as an example, we have 3 million citizens – we had 2.7 million stopover arrivals in the year 2019[1]. The average Jamaican is eating three meals a day, but the average visitor is eating four point four meals a day.”

He argues that contributions to the economy that are attributed to other sectors are sometimes linked to tourism.

“When you look at the direct impact of tourism in a country like Jamaica, the statistic is about 11 percent of GDP, but when you put the indirect attribution, meaning, [as an example], transportation in Jamaica, meaning buses are booked under transportation not tourism, but when the airports closed down because we couldn’t get our visitors there any longer, no buses were moving any longer. So that 11 percent of GDP jumps to 36 plus percent.”

Instead, Stewart suggests an alternative approach that he believes would both continue to support tourism while developing other sectors.

“We’re thinking about it wrong. We’re thinking about eliminating tourism. We should be thinking about amplifying all industries around it, from IT to agriculture to manufacturing. Everyone should be handholding, supporting, and we should be focused on import substitution, and making sure that we’re not importing products to the country that we can manufacture locally and produce locally, and you’d be amazed. The Caribbean has not done a good enough gap analysis of what a hotel uses. A hotel operates 365 days a year, most hotels 24 hours a day, and it is a machine of consumption. We should be consuming and buying more locally.” 

[1] Barbados typically welcomes more long-stay tourists each year than there are citizens.