Historic Conference Recommends Establishing Global Tourism Resilience Fund

The Global Tourism Resilience Conference, which just wrapped up in Jamaica, is recommending the establishment of a global tourism resilience fund to help the industry more successfully navigate unexpected periods of disruption.

Proposed by Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett, the fund would provide support to individual destinations in times of crises and disaster. The goal of the financial support would be to guarantee the sustainability of international travel and tourism, even amid challenges.

Calls for this new effort come on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting impact, which brought the global tourism industry to a halt. In 2019, tourism worldwide contributed a jaw-dropping $8.9 trillion to the global GDP. A 2021 report from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) projected that some $2 trillion dollars in industry revenue would be lost that year alone as a result of the ongoing pandemic-related challenges.

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In making its new recommendation, the Global Tourism Resilience Conference underscored the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic should always serve as a stark reminder “of the indispensable necessity to build tourism resilience" - adding that despite its reputation for being a highly resilient segment of the global economy, the travel industry "would always be vulnerable to various internal and external shocks.”

“While we talk about building resilience for tourism, we have to focus on the wider perspective on social, economic, political, health and security disruptions,” said Bartlett, according to Caribbean Journal.

The recommendation for a global tourism resilience fund was the culmination of the conference, which ran from February 15 through February 17 and was held at the University of the West Indies Regional Headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica.

Jamaica has been a leading voice when it comes to the importance of resilience planning in the travel industry. Bartlett himself has been heading up that charge and was behind the creation of a first-of-its-kind global tourism resilience center in 2019.

The biggest priority, Bartlett said, according to Caribbean Journal, is to build capacity to “predict, mitigate, manage disruptions when they arise, recover quickly and to thrive thereafter.”

To help provide the capital for the proposed global resilience fund, Bartlett floated the idea of creating an optional “voluntary resilience tip” that would be paid by the nearly 1.4 billion travelers around the world.

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