Voluntary “tips” from tourists could be just the ticket to help create a resilience fund that would support tourism-dependent nations in periods of disruption, according to tourism executives attending the first official Global Tourism Resilience Day (Feb. 17) in Jamaica last week.

The “resilience tip” generated from amongst the world’s 1.4 billion consuming travellers would be one way to finance the fund, suggested Jamaica’s tourism minister Edmund Bartlett, adding that the contribution would stay in the recipient countries where it was made “and build that fund to enable capacity for resilience.”

The fund could cover the fall-out from such “disruptions” as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, or health-related events like the pandemic.

The call for the creation of a resilience fund came as key players in tourism from around the world, including the Caribbean and Africa, devoted the third day of the first-ever Global Tourism Resilience Conference to continuing discussions on the “Road to Global Sustainability and Development.”

“While we talk about building resilience for tourism we have to focus in the wider perspective on social, economic, political, health and security disruptions,” said Bartlett, who was the driving force behind the Resilience Day initiative.

He outlined that most important of all is building human capacity to “predict, mitigate, manage disruptions when they arise, recover quickly and to thrive thereafter.”

He also underscored the need to build financial resilience while highlighting tourism’s responsibility in enabling highly tourism dependent countries “to be able to gain an insight into their own capacity to grow, to expand, and to enjoy prosperity.”

To this end, Bartlett made the call for the establishment of the special global tourism resilience fund, stating, “We as an industry have the capacity to enable this fund to happen seamlessly because we are the most consumption-driven activity on planet earth.”

Tariq Ali, GM for the Caribbean, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) agreed with the need for building tourism resilience as tourism recovers from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“While we would like to see more economies diversifying, a high-performing tourism sector is needed to see further economic growth and recovery,” he said, adding, “(But) we must be cautious while optimistic” as there are still several threats that could undermine achievements made so far.