Caribbean Charts a Bolder Tourism Economy

For decades, the Caribbean has occupied a curious paradox. It welcomes tens of millions of visitors each year, consistently ranks among the world’s most coveted destinations, and depends on tourism more than virtually any other region on earth — yet a staggering share of the wealth those visitors generate flows right back out of the islands. The bedding, the food, the uniforms, the cleaning supplies, the technology, even the packaging: much of it sourced from abroad, procured by multinational chains, and paid for in currencies that never quite settle into local hands.

That is the problem Jamaica’s Tourism Minister, the Hon. Edmund Bartlett, has spent years trying to solve. And in Antigua last week, at a landmark gathering of the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s newly formed Tourism Supply-Side Committee, the region took its most coordinated step yet toward dismantling what Bartlett has called the “extractive” model of Caribbean tourism.

A Committee With a Mission, and the Muscle to Match It

The CTO’s Tourism Supply-Side Committee met for the first time at Sandals Antigua in St. John’s, bringing together regional tourism ministers and stakeholders around a focused agenda: how to restructure the tourism economy so that Caribbean nations capture — and keep — a far greater portion of the revenue their industry generates.

Minister Bartlett chairs the newly established committee, and used the session to issue a strong call for coordinated regional action, including the development of a Caribbean tourism logistics hub designed to strengthen regional ownership of the supply chain.

The timing is not accidental. International tourist arrivals to the Caribbean rose 6.1 percent over 2023, reaching 34.2 million visitors in 2024 — a number that underscores the region’s enduring appeal but also sharpens the urgency of a question that has lingered too long: who actually benefits?

“Owning and strengthening the tourism supply-side is fundamental to dismantling the long-held perception that tourism is merely an enclave or extractive industry,” Bartlett stated at the meeting. “The Caribbean must position itself not only as a destination for visitors, but as a region that fully captures and retains the wealth generated from tourism within our own economies and communities.”

What Is a Caribbean Tourism Logistics Hub — and Why Does It Matter?

The concept at the center of this push — a regional tourism logistics hub — is both ambitious and practical. Rather than allowing hotels, resorts, and cruise lines to source supplies from global wholesalers based outside the region, the hub would create the infrastructure for Caribbean producers to scale up, compete on quality, and supply the industry from within.

The hub, envisioned to be located within a Special Economic Zone, would focus on three key pillars: mobilizing supplies for the tourism industry, expanding the Caribbean’s capacity for regional procurement, and developing new logistics and accounting services linked to tourism.

Think local coffee in the resort restaurant. Jamaican-made linens on the cruise ship. Barbadian rum stocked in the minibar by a regional distributor, not a Florida import company. The concept sounds deceptively simple, but the structural and logistical barriers to getting there have been stubborn.

“The logistics supply centre will broaden tourism’s impact on the economy and change the view that we are just about being housekeepers and bartenders. This is about creating a new area of value-added services and higher earning potential within the industry,” Bartlett explained during an earlier parliamentary address.

The proposed hub is expected to improve revenue retention, strengthen supply chain control, boost intra-regional trade, and create jobs and community wealth throughout the region — with employment growth anticipated in logistics, agriculture, light manufacturing, and related services.

For travelers, this shift has a meaningful downstream effect. A Caribbean tourism economy that is more self-sufficient and more equitably distributed is also one that is more resilient to global shocks, more invested in preserving its natural and cultural assets, and ultimately more sustainable as a destination over the long term.

The IDB and World Bank Enter the Picture

What makes this moment different from earlier versions of the same vision is the institutional firepower now backing it.

The Antigua meeting followed commitments secured by the CTO from two major multilateral institutions during high-level engagements in Washington, D.C. last month. The Inter-American Development Bank has agreed to fund a specialist consultant to undertake a comprehensive regional study on the tourism supply-side, focusing on strategies to help Caribbean economies retain a larger share of tourism earnings. A draft Terms of Reference for the consultancy is expected shortly, with the contract anticipated to be finalized by the end of June 2026, and the consultancy projected to run for approximately 10 to 12 weeks.

The World Bank has also confirmed its support and readiness to contribute to upcoming analytical work on Caribbean tourism sector resilience, including sectoral alignment and gap analysis.

These are not symbolic endorsements. The IDB and World Bank bring financing capacity, technical expertise, and the kind of global credibility that can open doors to further investment and policy reform. Their involvement signals that the supply-side argument — long championed by Bartlett and a handful of regional advocates — has crossed into mainstream development economics.

From Jamaica to the Wider Caribbean

While Jamaica has been the most vocal driver of this initiative, the vision is explicitly regional. A key part of the proposed hub is aimed at strengthening Jamaica’s role as a procurement centre for the wider Caribbean, supplying markets such as Trinidad and Barbados.

Barbados’ Minister of Tourism Ian Gooding-Edghill, who chairs the CTO Ministerial Council, explained that Bartlett’s appointment to lead the Supply-Side Committee “concretizes the decision taken by the CTO member countries to expand the region’s focus on building stronger linkages in the tourism sector.”

This framing matters. The Caribbean’s strength as a tourism region has always been its diversity — but that same diversity has historically made coordinated economic action difficult. Each island markets itself independently, competes for the same airlift, and negotiates its own supply contracts. The Supply-Side Committee represents a deliberate pivot toward what Bartlett has previously called “copetition” — a recognition that the region can be more powerful when it operates as a unit without surrendering the competitive edge that makes each destination unique.

“We cannot speak credibly about economic integration while leaving our largest industry to navigate global headwinds alone,” Bartlett stated at a recent CARICOM address. “CARICOM must establish a dedicated, high-level tourism mandate — with binding commitments, coordinated policies, and shared investment frameworks — that reflects the weight the industry carries in every member state.”

The Cruise Industry: An Early Front

One of the most tangible expressions of the logistics hub concept has already taken shape in Jamaica’s dealings with the global cruise industry. Several major cruise lines — including Carnival, Royal Caribbean, MSC, and Norwegian — have expressed keen interest in sourcing more of their global product needs from Jamaica, provided those goods meet their standards for quality, consistency, and reliable supply.

Jamaica’s agriculture sector stands poised to play a key role, with the island’s coffee, spices, fruits, and vegetables already highly sought in international markets. Craft products, art, and traditional goods could also be integrated into cruise supply chains, allowing local artisans to reach a genuinely international audience.

The scale of the opportunity is significant. Major cruise lines spend billions annually on onboard provisioning — food, beverages, consumer goods, amenities. Even a modest shift in procurement toward regional suppliers would represent a transformative injection of income into local economies, without requiring a single additional tourist to step off a plane.

Why Travelers Should Pay Attention

This might seem like policy-level news with little relevance to a traveler booking their next Caribbean escape. But the connection is direct.

A tourism economy that works for local communities is one that preserves the very things that make the Caribbean worth visiting: its cuisine, its culture, its environment, and the genuine warmth of its people. When hotels source locally, the food on your plate reflects the island’s actual agricultural heritage rather than a generic international menu. When artisans can sell into a supply chain rather than only at roadside stalls, the crafts and goods available to visitors are more authentic and more sustainable.

As Bartlett framed it at CTO Caribbean Week 2025 in New York, “We have an urgent duty to transform the Caribbean into a paragon of sustainable, resilient, and community-centred tourism. Our story is not one of victimhood — it is one of steadfast resilience and unbreakable unity.”

There is also a broader global tourism context here. Travelers increasingly care where their spending goes — whether their hotel stay benefits the local economy or primarily enriches an offshore holding company. The Caribbean’s supply-side reform agenda speaks directly to that demand. A region that can credibly demonstrate community benefit from tourism is one that will hold its competitive position as traveler values continue to evolve.

A Long Time Coming, Finally Moving

It is worth acknowledging that the logistics hub concept is not new. The idea emerged from Jamaica’s Tourism Recovery Task Force, chaired by Wilfred Baghaloo, back in 2020 — born out of the supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic. What has changed is the institutional momentum behind it. The CTO’s new committee, multilateral financial backing, and a growing chorus of regional ministers lending political capital to the initiative represent a qualitative shift from aspiration to architecture.

Jamaica’s Director of Tourism Donovan White, co-chair of the CTO Reimagine Oversight Committee, put it plainly: “The last two and a half years feel different… It feels like we are finally understanding that we have to pull in one direction.”

That direction is inward — toward regional production, regional ownership, and regional wealth. For a destination region that welcomes over 35 million visitors a year and remains the most tourism-dependent on earth, the stakes of getting this right could hardly be higher.

The beach, the rum punch, and the sunset are still the draw. But what happens behind the scenes — who grows the produce, who makes the goods, who captures the revenue — may ultimately determine whether Caribbean tourism remains a force for genuine prosperity, or continues to be, as critics have long argued, a beautiful industry that mostly enriches everyone except the islands themselves.

The meeting in Antigua suggests the region is finally, seriously, ready to change that.

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