Tourism is Jamaica's largest earner of foreign exchange, and the headline arrival and earnings numbers are strong. But a headline earnings figure measures how much money enters the country, not how much stays. A tourist dollar that arrives, pays a foreign-owned hotel chain, and largely departs again as imported food, imported furnishings, and repatriated profit has passed through Jamaica without settling in it. The right measure of tourism's value to Jamaica is not what arrives but what stays ashore.
The gap between what arrives and what stays is called leakage, and in an economy dominated by all-inclusive resorts and imported inputs, leakage can be large. Reducing it does not require more tourists; it requires each existing tourist dollar to touch more Jamaican hands — Jamaican farmers, Jamaican suppliers, Jamaican-owned experiences — before it leaves.
This paper measures tourism value by retained rather than gross earnings, maps where the leakage occurs, and offers four recommendations to the Ministry of Tourism for a linkage-led strategy that grows what stays without growing arrivals.
A country can raise its tourist arrivals every year and grow poorer per visitor if each additional visitor's spending leaks out faster than it lands. The arrivals number is a volume metric; it says nothing about how much of the spending is captured by the Jamaican economy. Yet arrivals is the number that gets celebrated, because it is the easiest to grow and the easiest to report.
The value metric is retained earnings per visitor: of everything a tourist spends, what share becomes income to a Jamaican person or firm before it leaves the country? An all-inclusive model, where the tourist pays a foreign chain up front and rarely spends outside the resort, can post excellent arrivals and poor retention simultaneously. A strategy anchored to retention asks a different question of every tourism decision: does this make the dollar stay longer, or only arrive?
Jamaica's tourism inputs — much of the food, furnishings, and supplies consumed by the resort sector — are imported rather than sourced domestically, so a large share of tourist spending leaks straight back out as import payments. Jamaican farmers and suppliers who could supply the sector are not linked into it, either because the sector's procurement bypasses them or because they cannot meet its volume and consistency requirements. The leakage is a linkage failure, and linkage is fixable.
The single largest retention opportunity is food. Every plate served in a resort from imported ingredients is a leaked dollar that a Jamaican farmer could have earned. Linking domestic agriculture into resort procurement — with the aggregation, cold chain, and consistency the sector requires — converts import payments into farm income.
Beyond food, resorts consume furnishings, amenities, construction, and services that are largely imported. Developing Jamaican suppliers capable of meeting the sector's standards captures another stream of spending that currently departs as imports.
A tourist who never leaves the resort spends almost entirely inside a foreign-owned enclave. Every reason to spend off-resort — Jamaican-owned tours, attractions, craft, food, and music — routes a share of spending directly to Jamaican hands, and deepens the visit's connection to the actual country.
Small Jamaican enterprises — craft, cuisine, guiding, culture — capture spending that no import can intercept, because the product is Jamaica itself. Enabling these enterprises to reach the visitor is pure retention.
The Ministry should publish an estimate of retained value per visitor alongside gross arrivals and earnings, so that tourism policy is judged by what stays in Jamaica, not only by what arrives. What is measured is what gets managed.
The Ministry, with the Ministry of Agriculture, should invest in the aggregation, cold chain, and quality systems that let Jamaican farmers reliably supply the resort sector — converting the largest single leakage channel, imported food, into domestic income.
The Ministry should work with the sector to set realistic, rising domestic-sourcing targets for food, supplies, and services, backed by supplier-development support so the targets are achievable rather than merely aspirational.
The Ministry should actively connect visitors to Jamaican-owned experiences, tours, and enterprises, capturing spending that the all-inclusive model otherwise keeps inside foreign-owned walls. Off-resort spending is retained by construction.
Jamaica does not have a tourism volume problem; it has strong arrivals and a powerful brand. What it has is a retention problem: too much of each tourist dollar arrives and leaves without settling in a Jamaican pocket. The remedy is not more tourists straining a finite island; it is deeper linkage, so that each existing dollar touches more Jamaican hands before it goes.
Measuring retained value, building the agriculture-to-resort chain, developing domestic suppliers, and routing spending to Jamaican enterprise are the levers that grow tourism's benefit without growing its footprint. Human Intelligence LLC is prepared to support the Ministry of Tourism in building the retained-value measure and the linkage strategy this requires.