Jamaica ramps up digital tourism plans

The Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB), has revealed that plans to create a digital experience for Jamaica’s tourism product are at an advanced stage.

The disclosure was made by Director of Tourism, Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB), Donovan White, during a recent Jamaica Information Service (JIS) ‘Think Tank’ at the agency’s head office in Kingston. 

“Our digital experience is a part of our growth over the last three years. Building a product takes some amount of time and we are very well advanced. We have spent a lot of the time during the pandemic creating new content,” he said. 

Mr. White noted that digital experiences are based on the ability to convey real experiences virtually. 

He said that to date, “We have created some 12 or 13 virtual tours of interesting places across Jamaica that are now currently available at visitjamaica.com coupled with written content as well.” 

Over the next several months, the Ministry and its agencies will work on a data management system and the transfer of data to information experiences. 

“Using data mining is a critical component to address our ability to target, retarget, reach new markets and to penetrate markets even deeper and wider than we can today,” he pointed out. 

Mr. White said that the entirety of digital experience is one that will take “several evolutions”, noting that “one of the important aspects of our digital transformation is baked into Minister’s [Bartlett] vision of us developing a Blue Ocean Strategy for tourism”. 

He noted that Blue Ocean is a model that “allows for your strategy to go into places where your competition does not compete with you or will have a hard time catching up with you in the short term”. 

“So, we are working to have that kind of approach to our thinking, to our strategic modelling, and so that our digital transformation will form part of that experience because, to date, we are still one of the few destinations that play in that space aggressively,” he added. 

The JTB is an agency of the Ministry of Tourism. It is charged with a mission of marketing the tourism product so that Jamaica remains the premier Caribbean tourism destination.

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