The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

PRIME Minister Dr Hubert Minnis suggested on Saturday he will hold town hall meetings with residents of Eleuthera to discuss Disney Cruise Line's proposed development of a destination at Lighthouse Point.

The development is being opposed by environmental activists.

In a joint opinion piece released last week, Bahamas National Trust executive director Eric Carey and One Eleuthera Foundation CEO Shaun Ingraham argued that the country must stop acquiescing to the cruise sector.

"We simply cannot afford to make material and ongoing mistakes in this (tourism) sector," they wrote. "As Bahamians, we owe it to ourselves to assure our political representatives approach the subject of tourism with the utmost care, attention and critical thinking. We must demand that our political representatives focus on preserving and growing segments of our tourism sector that offer the greatest return on investment, the highest employment and ownership potential, with the least environment and cultural degradation."

The pair noted that 75 percent of visitors to The Bahamas contribute only around ten percent of the country's total tourism dollars.

They said: "Who comprises this 75 percent? They are cruise passengers. Our minister of tourism has neither been ignorant of, nor silent on, the issue. Indeed, over the past two years he has made many public statements on the paradox. Mr D'Aguilar has not only shed light on this important fact, he has pledged to investigate ways in which our country might effectively increase the clearly anemic and disproportionally small contribution by the cruise industry to our tourism economy. His focus, however, has been limited to exploring ways in which we can entice cruise passengers to spend more money, but has largely ignored the elephant in the room: the increasing number of private cruise ports.

"The flip-side of the foregoing reality is that roughly 25 percent of our visitors contribute around 90 percent of our total tourism dollars. These gold-star contributors are our 'stop-over' visitors, to use a term adopted by our Ministry of Tourism. They are tourists who truly visit The Bahamas, stay in our hotels, eat in our restaurants, shop in our stores and visit our national parks, as well as our historical and cultural sites.

"We must not continue blindly to acquiesce to the cruise sector that contributes only 10 percent of our tourism revenue at an immeasurable cost. We cannot get Little Stirrup Cay back; it will never be the same. We cannot get Gorda Cay (Castaway Cay) back; it will never be the same. "None of the islands or enclaves we lease or sell to cruise lines can ever be gotten back. They are forever changed. As desperate as we may be for the hope of employment, of a steady pay-cheque, a philanthropic handout or two by a cruise line, we cannot surrender our critical thinking as we plot the future of our tourism economy.

"Right now, we are feeling the 'Disney effect,' a set of subjective assumptions based upon wishful outcomes rather than empirical evidence, but we must not look at the drama unfolding around Lighthouse Point without examining the larger picture. We Bahamians find ourselves in a watershed moment. Lighthouse Point is a 'golden goose,' and there are very few others like her. We can either allow it to be sold to a cruise line and doom ourselves to the status quo, an upside-down tourism economy where 75 percent of our visitors contribute only 10 percent of our tourism dollars and Disney doubles its profits, or we can put the same 'golden goose' to work for The Bahamas and Bahamian citizens, particularly Eleutherans. We can begin to steer our country towards more profitable models of tourism or we can spend the rest of our lives dreaming up ways in which to squeeze out a few more dollars from cruise passengers," they wrote.