If we've learned anything over the past couple of decades, it's that travel and tourism is a highly vulnerable industry that needs strong resilience skills to survive everything from hurricanes to armed conflict, volcanic eruptions to global pandemics.
For Jamaica's Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett, tourism resilience is a passion.
In 2018, he, along with Taleb Rifai, former secretary general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), founded the Global Tourism Resilience & Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC ) to address disruptions and crises in tourism.
Bartlett was in Canada this weekend to sign of a memorandum of understanding between the GTRCMC and George Brown College, establishing a satellite centre in Canada.
"Tourism is far too important to the global economy for it not to have the support and guidance that the Global Tourism Resilience & Crisis Management Centre offers," said Bartlett.
"It was created and is committed to bolstering destination preparedness, management and recovery from disruptions and crises that impact tourism and threaten economies and livelihoods globally," Bartlett said at the official signing.
The GTRCMC now has satellite centres in Nairobi, Kenya and Amman, Jordan. Along with Toronto, new centres will be opened this year in Sofia, Bulgaria, Abuja, Nigeria, Athens, Greece, Miami and London.
The launch of a satellite in Canada has been hailed by Bartlett as a major development for tourism in North America.
Bartlett is accompanied on his four-day trip to Canada by Jamaica minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, Olivia Grange. Their agenda also includes promoting the sixtieth anniversary of Jamaican independence.
"The Jamaica 60 celebrations are being launched in a very coordinated and strategic way in Canada to, among other things, engage members of the diaspora and to encourage them to travel to Jamaica along with their relatives, friends and colleagues to participate in the historic festivities, while stimulating growth in the tourism sector," Bartlett said.
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