Caribbean Travel Marketplace takes off in Montego

With 700 delegates gathering at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in Jamaica this week for Caribbean Travel Marketplace, the increase in hotel occupancy and tourists arrival had already taken a move towards the positive side in 2013 and the Caribbean travel market hopes to achieve the same in 2014 as well.

Hundreds of tour operators, tourism officials, hoteliers, government Ministers and others involved in the region’s largest economic driver are taking part in the two-day conference which has officially kicked off on 12.01.14.

Caribbean Travel Marketplace, which is put on by the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association, is one of the leading conferences in an industry that is the Caribbean’s largest economic driver.

The conference was kicked off by speeches from Evelyn Smith, president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, CHTA President Richard Doumeng and Jeff Vasser, the newly-appointed CEO of the CHTA.

The CHTA already held a major Board of Directors meeting and Leadership Conference earlier this week at the Half Moon Resort.

Last year’s Travel Marketplace, which was held at the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, saw more than 12,700 meetings, with delegates from 22 countries.

The conference has attracted 277 companies from 20 countries by 13.01.14 and pre scheduled business-to-business appointments are being conducted of about 11,560.