What Jamaica Wants After Deadly Hurricane? Visit Us, Island Says.
Tourism accounts for nearly a third of Jamaica’s economy, so officials are rushing to reopen dozens of hotels in time to salvage the vital winter travel season.
With power still out nine days after Hurricane Melissa swept through western Jamaica, Kellanie Kerr stood in the dark at the stifling hot souvenir shop in Negril where she works, waving a fan at her sole customer.
She tried to “guesstimate” how dependent Negril, a beach town on Jamaica’s far west coast, is on tourism.
“From a scale of one to 10? Ten,” she said. “Or maybe 100, because that’s what we use here to survive.”
Ms. Kerr is one of the more than half a million Jamaicans whose jobs depend directly or indirectly on tourism in the Caribbean country that, in October, was battered by its first Category 5 hurricane.
The storm killed at least 45 people, damaged about 150,000 buildings and homes and crippled the tourism industry, which the island nation relies on for nearly a third of its economy.
With dozens of hotels wrecked by the storm’s extraordinarily fierce winds and deluges of water, Jamaican authorities are rushing to reopen tens of thousands of hotel rooms in time for the crucial winter travel season. Tourism authorities announced that the country would be back in business for visitors by Dec. 15, which the government considers the start of the season, an ambitious goal that many hotels said they would not meet.
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