Sounding a wake up call for the country’s engine of economic growth, a top hotel executive has pointed to an anomaly between the promoted Bahamian tourism product and its actual delivery.
The Senior Vice President of the Wyndham Nassau Resort Robert Sands is urging the industry and the Bahamas Government to rectify the dilemma.
“One of the things the Bahamas gov’t and the industry must work on immediately is closing that gap through ongoing public relations, through ongoing training and through productivity based negotiations with our unions to ensure that the expected service levels can be delivered once they [tourists] arrive here,” he said on the Love 97 talk show Issues of the Day.
He pointed out that while millions of dollars are spent to promote The Bahamas as the ideal vacation destination with top service levels, very little is devoted to training tourism workers to fulfil that expectation.
Mr. Sands, like other hoteliers, has shared his concerns about the possible effects of international and domestic developments on the local tourism industry.
With the lingering threat of war, an American economy in need of stimulation and The Bahamas’ own economic woes, those worries are great, tourism officials have admitted.
But even the Minister of Tourism Obie Wilchcombe has conceded that the industry will have to work harder than ever to enhance its product.
“We have to improve our product and we are going to work feverishly to do that,” Mr. Wilchcombe said. “We have a greater demand not only for Nassau and Paradise Island, but also for Grand Bahama and the other Family Islands .”
ï¾ However, the reality is that some visitors to The Bahamas are still not satisfied with their experience, according to the latest exit surveys conducted by the Ministry of Tourism.
It is that problem that Mr. Sands is insisting a solution must be found for. The answer, he says, just might lie in education and training.
“We have done a poor job in the education of the general population of the overall importance of tourism in our country,” he said. “We have given a lot of lip service to it…but we have not taken that initiative of going to the core of education programmes, constant reminders to our people and retraining in an effort to close that gap.”
And then, there is the issue of tourism vibrancy in the face of stiff competition from top rivals like Cuba and the Dominican Republic with significant hotel rooms.
Mr. Sands believes that the country could stimulate its growth even more.
“The reality is that we have had very little growth if any in terms of total hotel rooms in this destination which suggests that we are not growing as rapidly as we should be growing,” he said.
The hotelier believes that the key to a vibrant tourism product is finding ways to incrementally increase hotel rooms which could eventually lead to further investment, job creation, more income per capita growth and economic stability.
Mr. Sands also identified labour productivity, overall hotel insurance costs, cost of utilities and the
The Bahama Journal
