Global Tourism Resilience & Crisis Management Centre launched in Jordan

Jordan’s facility is the sixth satellite GTRCMC centre to open worldwide

Jordan has welcomed the Global Tourism Resilience and Disaster Management Centre – MENA at Amman’s Middle East University. The facility will be referred to as the Taleb Rifai Centre and operate under the leadership of Professor Salam Almahadin, the president of the university.

Jamaica minister of tourism Edmund Bartlett and Kenya minister of tourism Najib Balala arrived in Amman to meet with Jordan’s minister of tourism Nayef Himiedi Al Fayez of Jordan to inaugurate the centre.

The agreement was signed at a ceremony held on the University’s campus with all ministers present and a large contingent of travel sector leaders.  

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At Expo 2020 Dubai, the GTRCMC has also successfully launched the 17 Feb as the annual Global Tourism Resilience Day as part of an international campaign to build resilience in the global travel industry through expansion of the Global Tourism Resilience and Disaster Management Centres.

In addition, the GTRCMC launched the Tourism Resilience Declaration and Fund and the new book Tourism Resilience

During the event, on 17 February, the GTRCMC signed and launched partnerships in Dubai with Canadian and Bulgarian schools of higher learning in order to support the centres with academic data. Speaking about the partnerships, Bartlett explained: “The students at all these universities are critical to the programme’s success, in that it starts with research, understanding and developing the regional risk profile, recommending best practices to influence policy-making based on empirical data and other success-based programmes. It’s a five-step programme starting with the youth: research, evaluate, mitigate, respond and recover.”

 Al-Fayez added: “We welcome the inception of the Taleb Rifai Centre here at the Middle East University. We trust that this initiative will play a key role in delivering resilience, robustness and agility to the tourism industry which is one of the most important sectors in the Jordanian economy through its 13% contribution to the GDP.”

For more information, visit www.gtrcmc.org