ABSTRACT
Tourism is the largest industry in the world. In Caribbean countries, in common with many other Small Island Developing States (SIDs), tourism has been the chief foreign-exchange earner. It is therefore hardly surprising that McElroy (2005) views the Caribbean as the most tourist-dependent region in the world with numbers increasing from 10 million stop-over visitors in 1990 to 21.8 million in 2004 (Caribbean Tourism organization [CTo], 2006). In Jamaica, tourism has proven to be the most indispensable industry especially since the agricultural and bauxite sectors have been faced with adversities in recent times. Despite the vulnerability of the island’s tourist industry to global variables such as terrorist attacks and natural hazards such as hurricanes, Jamaica has managed to sustain growth in visitor arrivals increasing by 15.3 percent in 2006 to reach the 3 million mark (Planning Institute of Jamaica [PIoJ], 2007).
