Edmund Bartlett, Tourism Minister recently announced the strategic partnership between Jamaica and the search engine giant Google to increase the number of visitors.
The tourism minister met and toured the leadership of Google at the company’s headquarters (Googleplex) in Silicon Valley, California.
He said that Jamaica’s tourism will gain with this agreement as Google is the most visited website in the world. There was a 10 per cent increase in queries from persons in United States for 2017 as compared to the same period last year.
Senior Advisor/ Strategist Delano Seiveright and Jamaica’s Honorary Consul to Los Angeles , Lorna Robinson joined the minister said that technology driven companies represent the reality now and the future.
People should not be scared of the potential impact of technology on tourism.
Bartlett mentioned that greater audience with potential new visitors should be addressed by the diversified partnership offered.
The scope of work with the government institutions worldwide, broad statistical overviews of search traffic about Jamaica and the Caribbean and select Latin American countries was presented by Google to the Jamaican delegation.
There was an exclusive data presentation by Google on how the people in the United States and Canada can search for Jamaica before heading towards a destination mentioned Seiveright.
There was three million monthly queries on Google.com about Jamaica in the US and it ranked among the top searches for ‘luxury vacations’. People in the market of trips to the Caribbean belongs to the highest income households in the USA as compared to other digital users.
US residents with a household income more than US $75,000 showing interest in visiting to the Caribbean was a big deal.
Google as a marketing tool reinforced deeper analysis of external and public online tools while looking at the digital best practices from other tourism institutions on how digital knowhow can be maximized to attract more tourist.
