Jamaica Tourism Minister: Tariffs Will “Cut Deeply” Into Tourism

The ongoing and escalating trade wars will “cut deeply” into tourism, both in the United States and abroad, according to Jamaica Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett, who spoke to reporters in New York on Wednesday.

Minister Bartlett, speaking at The Kimberly Hotel in Midtown, said he expects the eruption of tariffs and trade wars to spill over and significantly impact travel—even before any potential economic effects are felt by consumers.

“The latest round of tariffs, in my mind, is going to cut deeply into tourism’s energy and vitality—because tourism is all about the movement of people and goods. It’s about trading. And once we start talking about trade, we have to confront the cost of it. Tariffs may target goods, but their impact casts a wide shadow—one that inevitably falls over tourism as well,” he said.

Destinations in the United States that heavily rely on Canadian travelers—such as Arizona and New York City—will “feel the pinch much sooner than many other places,” he said. That might take time to materialize, since “the tourism sector doesn’t change overnight. Travel is booked months in advance,” but he emphasized the effects will come.

Bartlett added that it’s not just visitor numbers that will suffer. Trade wars, he said, chip away at the goodwill that travel helps facilitate between countries and erode the soft power tourism provides to nations with large volumes of outbound travelers, like the United States.

“Tariffs may target goods, but the response to them is like a great shadow that falls over hearts, plans, and plane tickets, too,” he said. “What we worry about is the immediate consequences of that disruption—and how long it will take to recover.”

Tourism Resilience

Bartlett, who was in New York to speak at NYU about the resilience of tourism, said the industry is constantly dealing with disruptions—whether caused by acts of God or acts of man.

“We in tourism have, over time, recognized the realities of disruptions. The only certainty in tourism is said to be uncertainty. We are always dealing with one disruption or another,” he said.

The tariff situation and the apparent “global realignment” underway are just the latest examples of challenges the travel industry must navigate. While the full extent of the disruption is still unknown, Bartlett believes the industry is better equipped to handle it than ever before.

“The growth of tourism in the last 100 years has been absolutely phenomenal,” he said, noting that tourism is now the world’s second-largest industry, employing 10% of the global labor force and accounting for 11% of global GDP.

“I recall when I became Minister of Tourism 13 years ago, there were 50 tourism ministers. The last time I went to the U.N., there were 150. It tells you how the industry has morphed and grown,” he said.

“As it has grown, it has built a capacity to manage, to mitigate, to recover quickly—and to thrive after,” he added.

Bartlett expects the U.S. to remain a major inbound market for Jamaica’s growing travel industry, which, before COVID-19, welcomed just under 3 million international visitors—a number that rose to 4.3 million last year. This growth requires the industry to remain agile and continue evolving, he added.

“We need to find new ways of being desirable to the new America that may emerge from all of this,” he said.