If playback is interrupted, you can restart it.
GENEVA/KINGSTON —Jamaica’s Tourism Minister, the Hon. Edmund Bartlett, has accepted an invitation from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to co-chair its Beyond Tourism Day 2026, placing one of the Caribbean’s most persistent advocates for tourism resilience at the center of a high-level global discussion about the future of one of the world economy’s most important industries.
Beyond Tourism Day will take place on September 25, 2026, at the World Economic Forum headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, under the theme “Resilient Growth. Renewed Impact.”
According to the invitation Minister Bartlett received, the closed-door gathering is expected to bring together approximately 80 leaders from business, government and civil society to address structural fragmentation and resilience across travel and tourism, including workforce challenges, technological disruption, infrastructure constraints, climate exposure and increasing pressure on destinations.
The invitation is significant not only for Bartlett and Jamaica. It may also indicate something much bigger: tourism resilience is moving from the sidelines of tourism policy into the mainstream global economic conversation.
And Bartlett has been arguing for precisely that shift for years.
From Jamaica to Geneva — and potentially Davos
Speaking to eTurboNews after receiving the invitation, Bartlett confirmed that he had accepted. “I replied in the affirmative, and they have expressed thanks, with details to follow!” the Minister told eTurboNews.
He sees the appointment as an opportunity extending beyond the September meeting itself. “I think it will be good positioning for our Resilience agenda and Tourism in the Davos discourses onwards!” Bartlett said.
“The WEF is the foremost Global Think Tank, highly respected, and tourism, one of the world’s most important economic activities, should correctly be given its place of prominence! I look forward to making my contribution.”
That assessment takes on added weight when considering the scale of the industry.
According to the World Travel & Tourism Council’s latest economic-impact research, Travel & Tourism contributed US$11.6 trillion to the global economy in 2025, representing 9.8% of global GDP, while supporting approximately 366 million jobs — roughly one in every nine jobs worldwide.
Tourism is therefore not simply about hotels, airlines and vacations. It intersects with employment, investment, transportation, infrastructure, food production, technology, finance, culture, energy, real estate, migration and international relations.
The World Economic Forum increasingly describes tourism accordingly: as a “sector of sectors.”
What is the World Economic Forum?
The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Geneva. It describes itself as an independent, not-for-profit organization and a platform for public-private cooperation, bringing together leaders from government, business, international organizations, academia and civil society. In 2015, Swiss authorities formally recognized the Forum as an international organization for public-private cooperation.
Its best-known gathering is the Annual Meeting in Davos, where heads of government, CEOs, international organizations and other influential figures meet to discuss global economic and geopolitical challenges.
The organization is currently led by President and CEO Alois Zwinggi, who signed Bartlett’s invitation together with WEF Managing Director Maroun Kairouz. WEF’s current leadership information confirms Zwinggi as President and CEO; he had initially assumed the role on an interim basis following Børge Brende’s departure earlier in 2026. Kairouz leads the Forum’s Centre for Regions, Trade and Geopolitics.
This context matters.
Bartlett is not being invited simply to another tourism conference. He is being brought into a platform whose principal currency is the intersection between economics, government, investment, geopolitics and private-sector decision-making.
For tourism, that distinction is important.
WEF itself is changing the tourism conversation
The invitation also fits an evolution already underway within the World Economic Forum.
WEF has produced its Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index since 2007. That framework evolved after the pandemic into the Travel & Tourism Development Index, explicitly designed to measure conditions enabling the sustainable and resilient development of tourism.
The Forum’s 2024 analysis warned that tourism’s impressive post-pandemic recovery should not obscure its vulnerabilities. It identified labor shortages, supply-demand imbalances, inflation, geopolitical conflicts, climate change, wildfires, technological disruption and overcrowding among the forces affecting destinations and businesses.
Those warnings look even more relevant today.
Tourism operates in an era in which a war thousands of kilometers away can change aviation routes and fuel prices overnight; a cyberattack can paralyze an airline or airport; extreme weather can devastate an island economy; artificial intelligence can transform employment requirements; misinformation can damage a destination almost instantaneously; and another health emergency could again disrupt international mobility.
In other words, resilience is no longer a specialist tourism subject. It is an economic necessity.
WEF goes “Beyond Tourism”
In November 2025, the World Economic Forum released Beyond Tourism: Coordinated Pathways to Inclusive Prosperity, developed with Kearney.
The report argues that tourism’s traditional fragmented structure is increasingly inadequate for challenges ranging from workforce shortages and environmental pressure to infrastructure, finance, technology and community relations. Instead, WEF advocates treating tourism as an interconnected ecosystem involving visitors, residents, governments, tourism companies, infrastructure providers, technology, finance and other sectors.
WEF subsequently launched the Beyond Tourism Impact Starsinitiative with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism and Kearney to identify and scale practical private-sector solutions addressing tourism’s major pressure points. The Forum says the objective is to spread successful approaches across destinations rather than leaving valuable solutions isolated within individual companies or countries.
The September 25 Beyond Tourism Day in Geneva therefore appears to be part of a broader repositioning of tourism within WEF.
And this is where the Bartlett appointment becomes particularly interesting.
Why Edmund Bartlett?
The Forum’s invitation itself gives an answer.
It tells Bartlett that his leadership is particularly relevant because of “Jamaica’s experience in placing resilience at the heart of its tourism growth and competitiveness agenda.”
That is more than diplomatic language.
For years, Bartlett has pursued an argument that initially received considerably less global attention than it does today: tourism-dependent countries cannot measure success solely through arrivals, hotel rooms and visitor expenditure. They must also measure their ability to anticipate shocks, withstand them, manage them and recover quickly.
That thinking helped lead to the establishment of the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC)in Jamaica.
Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre
The Centre says it was founded in 2018 by Bartlett and operationalized by Professor Lloyd Waller. Headquartered in Jamaica and developed as an international tourism resilience think tank, its work includes crisis preparedness and recovery, policy advice, research, training and data analysis, with areas of focus including climate, cybersecurity, digital transformation, entrepreneurship and pandemic resilience.
The concept itself grew from discussions surrounding the 2017 Global Conference on Jobs and Inclusive Growth in Jamaica, held through a partnership involving the then-UN World Tourism Organization, the Government of Jamaica, the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank.
In retrospect, the timing was remarkable.
The Centre existed before COVID-19 brought global tourism almost to a standstill and transformed “tourism resilience” from an academic or policy concept into an existential issue for destinations around the world.
From a Jamaican idea to a United Nations observance
Bartlett subsequently pushed the resilience concept further.
On February 17, 2022, during Expo 2020 Dubai, Jamaica launched Global Tourism Resilience Day, an initiative described by Jamaica’s Ministry of Tourism as Bartlett’s brainchild.
Jamaica then pursued international recognition through the United Nations.
On February 6, 2023, Bartlett personally introduced the draft resolution on Global Tourism Resilience Day before the United Nations General Assembly.
The General Assembly adopted the resolution by consensus and proclaimed February 17 as Global Tourism Resilience Day, intended to highlight the need for resilient tourism capable of dealing with emergencies and shocks and to encourage national recovery strategies, public-private cooperation and diversification.
That is an extraordinary progression for an idea originating from a small Caribbean tourism economy:
Jamaica → Global Tourism Resilience Centre → international advocacy → United Nations General Assembly → an official UN Global Tourism Resilience Day.
The movement has continued to expand. In February 2026, the fourth Global Tourism Resilience Day Conference and Expo was held in Nairobi, Kenya — the first annual international observance of the event hosted outside Jamaica and its first staging on the African continent.
Is the WEF invitation recognition of Bartlett’s resilience work?
The World Economic Forum has not publicly characterized the co-chair invitation as an award or formal recognition of Bartlett’s role in establishing Global Tourism Resilience Day or the GTRCMC.
It would therefore be inaccurate to report that WEF has officially made such a declaration. But it is difficult to ignore the connection.
WEF specifically cites Jamaica’s leadership in putting resilience at the heart of tourism growth and competitiveness as a reason Bartlett is relevant to the role.
The subject matter of Beyond Tourism Day — resilience, fragmentation, workforce pressures, technology, infrastructure, climate exposure and destination pressures — also overlaps substantially with the agenda Bartlett and the GTRCMC have promoted internationally.
The more appropriate conclusion is therefore that the invitation can reasonably be interpreted as significant international validation of a policy agenda Bartlett and Jamaica have championed for years, even though WEF has not formally described it as recognition of Global Tourism Resilience Day itself.
That distinction is important.
Jamaica’s vulnerability became its expertise
There is another reason Jamaica’s role deserves attention.
Small island tourism economies often experience global disruption before larger economies fully appreciate its consequences.
A hurricane does not merely affect beaches. It affects airports, hotels, workers, farmers supplying resorts, transportation companies, restaurants, cruise operations, government revenue, foreign exchange earnings and investment.
A pandemic does not simply reduce visitor numbers. It can shut down one of the principal mechanisms through which an island economy earns foreign currency and supports employment.
For countries such as Jamaica, resilience is therefore not an abstract sustainability slogan. It is economic survival.
Bartlett’s contribution has been to try to transform that vulnerability into institutional knowledge that can be exported globally.
Tourism resilience meets geopolitical resilience
This may be where WEF’s involvement becomes particularly consequential.
The Forum sits at the intersection of the private sector and governments and increasingly deals with economic resilience in an environment of geopolitical fragmentation.
WEF itself recently described the global environment as one of profound transformation, geopolitical complexity, economic realignment and value-chain reconfiguration.
Tourism cannot remain insulated from those forces.
- Wars alter flight paths.
- Trade tensions affect investment.
- Energy shocks increase transportation costs.
- Visa restrictions change travel flows.
- Artificial intelligence reshapes tourism employment.
- Climate change alters the viability and seasonality of destinations.
- Cybersecurity threatens airlines, airports, hotels and national tourism infrastructure.
- And political instability can erase years of destination marketing in days.
For an industry responsible for nearly one tenth of the global economy, resilience must therefore be discussed not only by tourism ministers but also by finance ministers, technology leaders, infrastructure investors, insurers, development banks, security specialists and heads of government.
That is exactly the kind of cross-sector audience WEF can convene.
From resilience advocacy to resilience architecture
Bartlett has lately been arguing that the next stage must go beyond talking about resilience.
At the 2026 Global Tourism Resilience Day Conference in Nairobi, he renewed his call for a Global Tourism Resilience Fund, designed to support technical assistance during crises, cybersecurity, misinformation-response capacity, research, early-warning systems and resilience monitoring.
- This could become one of the more interesting issues to watch as Bartlett enters the WEF environment.
- The Global Tourism Resilience Day created recognition.
- The GTRCMC created an institutional framework.
- A global resilience fund could potentially introduce a financing mechanism.
And WEF could provide access to precisely the mixture of governments, global corporations, financial institutions, investors and policy leaders needed to move such concepts from tourism discussions into wider economic decision-making.
A bigger seat at the global table for tourism
There is another dimension to Bartlett’s appointment that should not be underestimated.
Tourism frequently describes itself as one of the world’s largest economic sectors, yet it does not always enjoy a corresponding position in the world’s most influential economic and geopolitical discussions.
That is the contradiction Bartlett appears eager to address. WEF’s own Beyond Tourism initiative may help.
In announcing its Principles for Transformative Tourism in 2025, the Forum described travel and tourism as an interconnected “sector of sectors” and argued that coordinated action across industries can generate greater economic, social and environmental benefits than isolated tourism policies.
That philosophy is remarkably compatible with the resilience agenda developed in Jamaica.
- Resilience requires aviation to speak with destinations.
- It requires governments to speak with hotels.
- It requires tourism ministries to speak with finance ministries.
- It requires technology companies to engage with regulators.
- It requires insurers, banks and investors to understand destination risk.
- And it requires local communities to benefit sufficiently from tourism that they remain stakeholders in its success.
- That is, quite literally, beyond tourism.
Geneva could be more than another meeting
The September 25 gathering will be closed-door, and details of Bartlett’s co-chair responsibilities are still expected from WEF. But symbolically, the appointment already matters.
A concept strongly associated with Jamaica — tourism resilience— has travelled from a vulnerable Caribbean island economy into academia and institutional development, through a global crisis, onto the floor of the United Nations General Assembly and now into a leadership role at a World Economic Forum tourism gathering.
The next question is whether this momentum can translate into concrete global architecture for tourism preparedness.
- Can destinations establish measurable resilience standards?
- Can early-warning systems be shared internationally?
- Can tourism-dependent developing countries obtain financing before and immediately after disasters?
- Can cybersecurity and AI disruption become integral parts of tourism preparedness?
- Can governments treat tourism infrastructure as strategically as they treat energy, transportation and telecommunications?
- And can tourism finally secure a permanent place in the world’s major economic and geopolitical conversations?
For Bartlett, the Geneva invitation offers another platform from which to make that case. For Jamaica, it is an opportunity to convert the country’s vulnerability into global thought leadership. And for world tourism, the timing could hardly be more relevant.
The industry has recovered impressively from COVID-19, but recovery should not be confused with immunity from the next crisis.
Jamaica’s lesson is straightforward: the next shock is not the question. The question is whether tourism will be ready for it.
On September 25 in Geneva, that argument will have a prominent seat at the World Economic Forum table.
Leave a Comment