Jamaica Tourism Minister Hon. Edmund Bartlett announced that his ministry has hired international crisis recovery expert Jessica Shannon to its COVID-19 Tourism Recovery Task Force in an effort to strength the country’s resilience plan for the sector.
Shannon is a Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) advisory partner and has served as its deployed point partner throughout the Ebola crisis, focusing on the response and recovery efforts in West Africa. In this context she served as a senior advisor to private companies and government organizations in the design of strategy, policies and protocols as well as risk identification and monitoring.
In addition to her current client engagements, she is part of a small task force established to refine and drive the implementation of PWC's global near- and mid-term strategic transformation in the wake of COVID-19. She has also been a subject matter expert for the G20 think tank on economic and financial resilience and a speaker at conferences hosted by Harvard University, the World Bank and the United Nations. Prior to PWC, she gained strategy experience as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and on the global leadership team at EY.
This is the second addition to the committee from Price Waterhouse Coopers, as it also includes PWC’s senior partner, Wilfred Baghaloo, who chairs the COVID-19 General Tourism Working Team sub-committee. Baghaloo was also the co-chairman of the Tourism Working Group for the Jamaica Tourism Linkages Committee, which assessed how to ensure more local linkages to tourism industry and the development of local supply industries to the tourism sector.
The Ministry established the COVID-19 Tourism Recovery Taskforce last month, with a public-private sector collaboration consisting of key stakeholders from the tourism sector, the Ministry of Tourism and Agencies of the Ministry. It will be supported by two working teams—one for general tourism and another for cruise tourism—and a secretariat.
The Task Force has been created to bring about a realistic view of the sector’s baseline; develop scenarios for multiple versions of the future; establish the strategic posture for the sector, as well as a broad direction of the journey back to growth; establish actions and strategic imperatives that will be reflected across various scenarios; and establish trigger points to tackle action, which includes a planned vision in a world that is learning to evolve rapidly.
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