JAMAICA | ‘Colonisation all over again’: Purkiss blasts tourism leakage, foreign lock-out in maiden sectoral address

Opposition Tourism Spokesperson uses her first sectoral presentation to indict a decade of economic haemorrhage — seventy cents on every all-inclusive dollar leaking overseas, billions in airline subsidies, Jamaican professionals training the expatriates promoted above them, and hurricane-hit workers still waiting on THARP.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, JUNE 9, 2026 - Calvin G. Brown | Politics |  — Opposition Spokesperson on Tourism and Linkages, Andrea Purkiss, has delivered a blistering indictment of Jamaica’s tourism economy, using her maiden sectoral presentation in Parliament on Tuesday to catalogue a litany of anomalies she says must be investigated, upgraded and improved if the island is to recover lost market share and stem a decade of economic leakage.

At the centre of her presentation sat a single, devastating figure. “For every single dollar spent by an all-inclusive tourist in Jamaica, up to seventy cents leaks straight back out of our economy to overseas travel agents, foreign-owned mega-airlines, and international supply chains,” the Eastern Hanover MP told the House.

The Government’s own numbers, she argued, confirm the charge. “The Minister’s own recent data confesses that a staggering sixty percent of every single dollar earned by this sector exits Jamaica immediately. It does not circulate. It does not multiply. It takes an immediate U-turn, right back from whence it came,” Purkiss lamented.

10x10x10: a new acronym while hotels stay shuttered

Purkiss took direct aim at Minister Edmund Bartlett’s newly minted “10x10x10” initiative, unveiled at a reception in New York earlier this month: ten million visitors, ten billion US dollars, over the next ten years. A new acronym, she noted pointedly, conjured up even as the Minister’s much-trumpeted 5x5x5 target — five million visitors and US$5 billion in annual earnings — was never met.

The new slogan, she argued, collides with a sobering reality on the ground. Only eighty percent of Jamaica’s room inventory is currently operational, with full recovery not expected until sometime in 2027.

Meanwhile, workers at the island’s major Spanish-owned properties have not returned to work, as those hotels remain closed — some now taking approximately twelve months to reopen, leaving thousands of hospitality workers in deepening crisis. The Minister, Purkiss suggested, was selling Manhattan a decade of promises while tourism workers at home could not survive the month.

Taxpayers underwriting airline profits

Purkiss trained her fire on the administration’s airline subsidy regime, noting that “since 2015, this administration has paid out over $2.86 billion in subsidies to airlines serving markets that represent less than half a percent of our arrivals.”

Through Jamaica Vacations Limited, she explained, between $240 million and $300 million is funnelled annually into Seat Support guarantees — “meaning Jamaican taxpayers underwrite corporate airline profits whether those planes fly full or empty.”

Local transport operators ‘cut out at every turn’

The Opposition spokesperson lamented that the Jamaica Union of Travellers Association (JUTA) — created by PNP Minister Francis Tulloch — along with its spin-off JCAL, is being systematically displaced as major hotel properties establish their own in-house transportation companies, cutting the local operators out at every turn.

“At Spanish-operated all-inclusive properties, foreign companies control transportation while local drivers still pay park fees to access compounds from which they are excluded. The all-inclusive model is a vertical integration machine: the room, the food, the entertainment, and now the vehicle — all under one foreign corporate umbrella,” Purkiss pointed out.

“Madam Speaker, it is colonization all over again. The structure ensures the bulk of tourism revenue never touches Jamaican soil.”

Vacation Clubs: Jamaican expertise, expatriate titles

Turning to the lucrative Vacation Club segment, Purkiss revealed that approximately thirteen Vacation Clubs operate across twelve hotel properties in Jamaica — the majority Spanish-operated — generating roughly US$150 million annually. Yet, she charged, “Jamaicans initially were strategically kept out of the management of every single one. Every project director was an expatriate. Every sales director was an expatriate. Paid in US dollars.”

The indignity, she said, runs deeper still. “Many of these same Jamaican professionals — the ones deemed unworthy of the director title, the dollar-denominated salary, the management authority — are routinely used to train the very expatriates who are then placed above them.

Jamaican knowledge. Jamaican expertise. Jamaican institutional memory — transferred, extracted, and handed to a foreign national who arrives knowing less, earns more, and leaves with everything the Jamaican taught him.”

More troubling, she observed, is how these directors arrive. “Many of these directors do not arrive through any conventional recruitment process. They arrive as vacationers checking into the very hotels where they manage these exclusive Clubs. Within approximately two months, they are granted work permits for jobs that qualified Jamaicans are demonstrably capable of performing.”

Meanwhile, the Jamaicans working beside them are hired on short-term contracts with mandatory contract breaks — what Purkiss described as “a deliberate interruption of continuous employment to prevent them from accumulating the right of permanence that Jamaican labour law would otherwise guarantee. The expatriate gets the work permit in two months. The Jamaican gets the contract break to ensure she never becomes permanent.”

THARP: a night auditor living in her car

Purkiss reserved some of her sharpest criticism for the Tourism Housing Assistance and Recovery Programme (THARP), which promised aid to tourism workers whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Melissa while they remained on the job serving visitors. Very few, she reported, have benefited — among them a hotel night auditor who lost her home and is presently living in her car and under a tent, still awaiting assistance.

“Madam Speaker, I ask the Minister directly: what is the status of the THARP programme? How many applications have been processed nationally? How many workers have received assistance? What is the total disbursement to date? And what is the timeline for honouring the commitments made to the hundreds of tourism workers still waiting?”

Half-empty hotels and a 2:00 a.m. tax

The numbers underpinning the sector’s health, Purkiss argued, tell their own story. The Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association has declared that local properties require a sustained 70 percent national occupancy rate to remain healthy and comfortably support workers.

Yet occupancy slipped to 64.2 percent in 2017, fell back to 64.2 percent in 2019, and — following the passage of Hurricane Melissa — has plummeted to a dismal year-to-date average of just 53.5 percent. “Our hotels are half-empty. Our workers are facing catastrophic shift-cuts.”

And the Government’s response to small operators in crisis? “It was not support. It was not relief. It was a tax that slipped through this Parliament like a thief in the night,” she charged. Near 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, at the tail end of a marathon sitting, the Government passed a measure forcing local Airbnb operators to pay 15 percent General Consumption Tax from April 1, 2027 — “without a single shred of public consultation.”

“They demand first-world tax compliance from a backyard host, but give them third-world parish infrastructure in return.”

It was, by any measure, an unsparing parliamentary debut — one that served notice that the Opposition intends to interrogate not merely how many visitors land at Jamaica’s airports, but how much of their money ever truly lands in Jamaican hands.

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