Jamaica Tourist Board Members All Resign
The entire board of the island’s tourism promotions agency resigned Friday, leaving the country wide-eyed and O-mouthed even as Tourism Minister Ed Bartlett claimed the action was taken to give him a free hand in choosing new directors to move Jamaica’s tourism forward in light of the global financial crisis.
On Friday night, at a hastily called press conference at the tourism ministry in New Kingston, Bartlett dismissed claims that the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) directors resigned because they had a difficulty with a decision to also make the chairman, John Lynch, the new director of tourism.
Bartlett maintained that the members of the less than one-year-old board decided to resign so that he could reappoint a new team to meet the ever changing demands of tourism globally.
The decision, he said, was arrived at by the board members, without his influence, after he updated them on the just concluded World Travel Market in London and the crisis facing many tourism-dependent economies like Jamaica.
Last night, Lynch and Wayne Cummings, who is also president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA), the only two members of the just resigned board at the news conference, denied that there were any dissensions within the board or that they were forced to resign.
He said in fairness they must give the minister the leeway to put in place a team that will support decisions going forward. Asked whether he was poised to become the next director of tourism, Lynch said it would not be appropriate to comment on that since the committee had not yet made a decision on who would be chosen.
In the meantime, Bartlett said there are possibilities that existing members of the board could be reappointed as “every member on the board is eligible”.
