Speaking at a recent Rotary Club meeting, Minister Wilchcombe said that although the country is ranking high among the region's top tourist destinations, more can be done to develop the industry.
"We still have so much more to do in making this number one industry, in fact, number one for more Bahamians to benefit from," said Minister Wilchcombe. "We are still ranking high in terms of market share.
"The only countries that are ahead of us right now are the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and of course, then there is The Bahamas," he continued. "We are still in the fourth position and when you look at the number [of visitors] going to those countries, well we are doing very well but those countries of course have more hotel rooms than we do."
For this reason, Minister Wilchcombe insisted, the three countries will continue to rake in more visitors. But he added that until hotel accommodations in The Bahamas are increased, the industry will never move beyond its current stage.
"I have made the point over and repeatedly that no matter what we say, we can't expand tourism as we wish today. Because if we sold every single hotel room every single day of every year, we'll still only be able to bring in 1.7 million overnight visitors. So we simply don't have the hotel rooms," he explained.
According to Minister Wilchcombe, the country's hotel room count has only expanded by 2,000 in the past 20 years.
"That means we only have about 13,000 hotel rooms," he said. "Nine thousand exist here in New Providence; 3,000 in Grand Bahama – of course we have 1,000 out of service because of Royal Oasis; and around the family islands are the rest.
"So we still don't have enough hotel rooms and when you look at places like the Dominican Republic and Cuba with 45,000 rooms, we're still lagging behind in terms of hotel room count," he said.
Minister Wilchcombe also admitted that hotel expansions by the country's two largest development groups would not be enough to significantly boost the country's room count.
"Even though we have Sun International and the Cable Beach development talking about additional rooms, it's still not going to provide the kind of expansion that we believe can in fact be accommodated in New Providence," he said. "Certainly when you look outside New Providence, you think about Grand Bahama and that island could use about 10,000-15,000 hotel rooms; it has the land space." But the Tourism Minister said the government is doing all it can to entice other resort developers to invest in The Bahamas.
"We have looked outside The Bahamas very often," said Minister Wilchcombe. "We've looked to North America, Europe, now we're looking to Asia. We look all over the world for people to involve themselves in developing the Tourism industry."
Meanwhile, the Tourism industry continues to rake in money. More than five million tourists visited in 2005 despite last year's record-breaking hurricane season.
According to a Ministry of Tourism press statement, statistics show that air arrivals were up last year.
"Visitor arrival statistics provided by the Immigration Department reveal that foreign air arrivals were up for eight islands, inclusive of New Providence, compared with last year," it read. "Air arrivals were up for New Providence, Andros, Berry Islands, Cat Cay, Cat Island, Eleuthera, Exuma and Inagua."
By: JASMIN BONIMY, The Nassau Guardian
