This was stated by Jeremy MacVean, the Bahamas Hotel Association’s president, who also said that this is the tourism segment that delivers the greatest amount of revenue for any destination.
The Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Aruba all experienced significant growth in tourist arrivals in 2003, while numbers for the Bahamas remained flat.
In an interview with The Tribune at the Caribbean Hotel Association’s (CHA) Caribbean Marketplace Conference, Mr. MacVean said one of the many primary factors driving the growth throughout the rest of the Caribbean was improvements in airlift.
Flights from the major tourism markets in the northeast US have become more expensive, but the success of smaller, low-cost carriers in certain markets has helped keep airline ticket prices low.
In board meetings held just prior to the opening of Caribbean Marketplace, industry executives learned that when the major carriers received competition from lower-cost carriers, they tended to reduce ticket prices to enhance their competitiveness.
The Bahamas, though, had been unable to attract lower cost airlines, which allowed the main carriers to keep their prices high or even raise them. Obie Wilchcombe, minister of tourism, has already targeted the cost of airline tickets as a potential impediment to visitors selecting the Bahamas and is examining ways to overcome this.
Another concern was for the Bahamas was that the Dominican republic, Cuba and Barbados had been able to negotiate direct flights from several European markets, including Germany and Spain. British Airways currently only offered the non-stop flight into the Bahamas from the UK, but non-British European travellers were required to make two or three connections before arriving in this nation, something many are reluctant to do.
The World Tourism Organisation’s report for the eight months to August 2003 also showed how the Dominican Republic and Cuba are enjoying far greater growth than The Bahamas. For those two nations total arrivals to August 2003 were ahead of 2002’s figures by 19.7 per cent and 14.3 per cent respectively, while this nation’s growth rate for air arrivals only was just 1.7 per cent.
Data from the Ministry of Tourism showed that for the first six months in 2003 average expenditure per stopover visitor fell by0.4 per cent from $1,081.9 to $1,0776 compared to the year-before period.
Nassau and Paradise Island saw a 4 per cent decline in average per capita visitor spending falling from $1,296.4 to $1,243.9. Grand Bahama, though saw per capita stopover spending rise by 5 per cent from $634.7 to $664.2.
Stopover visitors spent an average of 5.8 nights in The Bahamas in the year to June 30, spending a total of $892.8 million, of which 32 per cent went on accommodation and 25 per cent on on-island pre-paid packages.
By Yolanda Deleveaux, Tribune Business Reporter at the Caribbean Marketplace Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico
