Jamaica Tourism Minister Hon. Edmund Bartlett says plans are in high gear for Jamaica to host the first ever UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism Organization) Summit on Innovation and Resilience Management, in Montego Bay this May.
“Jamaica has been selected as the venue for the first ever Global Summit on Innovation and Resilience Management. This is very important for us as a destination because the discussions on resilience have become the new reality within tourism and by extension the global space. It is resilience that will give us the capacity to respond to the global disruptions that are coming daily,” said Minister Bartlett.
The two-day UNWTO Global Summit on Innovation and Resilience Management begins on May 28 at the Montego Bay Convention Centre and coincides with the 65th Meeting of the Regional Commission for the Americas (CAM), of which Jamaica is currently the Chair.
“This conference is going to look very seriously at models [of resilience building] and get best practices from different countries on how ideas have been coming together to build capacity and help us in the Caribbean in terms of dealing with these seismic events that are now part of our reality,” he said.
He added that, “The other key part of it is innovation, which is at the heart of understanding how to add value to our process. Adding value is what we are about… So start-ups will be a big part of this conference. We are going to be looking at examples of start-ups with the Caribbean.”
The Tourism Minister also stated that the conference is going to focus on how to create new and exciting experiences for the industry with key experts from across the globe sharing how they think the future of tourism is going to be constructed.
“We have to get a better understanding overall about how the future of tourism is going to be constructed and this conference will seek to look into that. Change creates a level of uncertainty unless you have knowledge and you are able to be guided by analytics. This is what we are about… We are building the capacity to be able to project better, to respond faster and to be nimble and adaptive,” said Minister Bartlett.
