Tourism stakeholders are aggressively moving ahead with a campaign to apprise as many United States residents as possible of the US government’s policy change which will require them to travel with a passport or other accepted document when re-entering the US from The Bahamas and other Caribbean destinations, as of the end of this year.
According to Executive Vice-President of the Bahamas Hotel Association [BHA] Frank Comito, the latest element of that campaign – and all previous efforts – has the common aim of getting prospective American travellers to The Bahamas to obtain a passport or other acceptable travel documentation before the end of 2006.
Recently, some BHA member properties began displaying posters notifying tourists of the impending policy change, which will take effect in a little over 10 months.
“We are encouraging people who are at the airports and sea ports, who are in the hotels and who will be travelling to our travel shows and trade shows to display the posters which provide basic information and are telling folks to be ready and prepared for the change which will require US visitors travelling to The Bahamas to have a US passport to return to the US by January 1st, 2007,” Mr. Comito told The Bahama Journal.
“Concurrently we have met with US State Department officials and have explored what they are doing and we are hoping that there can be a more coordinated approach by the US government as well as by the travel partners, both in the United States and in the Caribbean region, to get the word out.”
According to Mr. Comito, tourism officials from around the Caribbean region are also reviewing some of the material that local officials have developed as part of the public awareness campaign, with a view to possibly using some of the material in their jurisdictions.
The new passport requirement is an element of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative spearheaded by the US Department of State and Department of Homeland Security and will require all travellers to and from the Americas, the Caribbean and Bermuda to have a passport or other accepted document in order to enter or re-enter the United States.
The State Department’s travel website indicates that in addition to a passport, other secure accepted documents, which establish the bearer’s identity and nationality, will also be permitted.
Mr. Comito, meanwhile, said while local officials are pleased with the progress they have made thus far in notifying prospective visitors from The Bahamas’ largest tourist market – the United States – of the planned change, tourism stakeholders are nevertheless anxious to minimise any fallout.
For the first time in its history, The Bahamas recorded more than five million visitors in 2004. That feat was repeated last year.
“There needs to be a real stepping up of awareness and the processing of Americans who don’t have passports – there needs to be a real stepping up of that overall effort,” said Mr. Comito.
“We know that the United States government has laid in some additional infrastructure to be able to support the expedient processing of passports and they are indeed seeing a rise in the number of passports being processed. But we think that it needs to be much broader than that. We believe that there will be some impact, primarily on our impulse travellers, and we’re concerned about it.”
According to Mr. Comito, tourism officials in The Bahamas are hopeful that stakeholders in the United States would maintain and even intensify their public awareness campaign because efforts in this country – organised primarily by the Ministry of Tourism, various promotion boards which serve the islands of The Bahamas and the BHA – are for the most part limited to persons who actually travel here.
By: Darrin Culmer, The Bahama Journal
