Bartlett

As of today all United States of America citizens who travel by air to Jamaica must have a passport to re-enter their country, due to the expiration of the deadline for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) at midnight, yesterday.

The WHTI requires all U.S. citizens, Canadians, Bermudans and Mexicans to have a passport or other accepted secure document to enter or re-enter the United States within the Western Hemisphere.

After an original deadline of January 23, the U.S. Government was forced to ease the procedures governing travel by its citizens travelling to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. This came after they came under severe criticism from irate passport applicants and congressmen, and the burden of an overloaded system flooded by millions of applications that they have been unable to process on time.

Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett, while acknowledging that the WHTI has had an impact on arrivals in the region, says that there has been an improvement in the processing of the essential documents.

Turnaround time

"The U.S continued to show significant improvement in the rate of processing of passports. The information coming is that the turn-around time has been improved from 14 weeks 10-12 weeks, and that the indications are that it will improve even better. The compliance rate has also improved significantly because they are now doing somewhere in the region of a million passports per month, but it still means that it is going to take perhaps another five years or so for the American population to be sufficiently documented in that regard to make the whole industry feel very comfortable."

Mr. Bartlett says his administration would be pursuing aggressive marketing strategies in the U.S market to fill the gap, which has been created by the U.S initiative.

"We can't sit and say that we are going to allow our stopover arrivals to fall simply because everybody in the U.S doesn't have a passport. Enough people who travel have passports and also the compliance levels have been increasing and improving.

The minister, who is aiming for a 10 per cent increase by the end of 2008 to 1.5 million visitors from the U.S, believes forays by the Jamaican tourist officials into additional emerging markets can shore up the tourism industry.