David Shields Market Quotations

The announcement of American Airlines to start Dallas, Fort Worth, is strategically important for Jamaica and is a very important opportunity for our Midwest market, and western U.S., as well as western Canada. Our Japanese market will also benefit significantly because the American Airlines flight will allow for same day one-stop service from Narita Tokyo in Japan to MoBay.

This was in fact before the establishment of the embassy last year, and proved to have been very useful for us from a tourism perspective, also in terms of Jamaica's understanding of the market and also from some indications of cultural activities and cultural levels.

We're not expecting a large volume of Chinese visitors to (suddenly) run to Jamaica. So we're looking at the marketing in a structured, managed way. We know we need to look at the return on the investment. There are lots of challenges but there has been tremendous support from other agencies of government, from the foreign affairs and national security ministries. We have to be patient.