Tourism Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar.
By LEANDRA ROLLE
Tribune Staff Reporter
lrolle@tribunemedia.net
WITH the continued roll-out of several COVID-19 vaccines abroad, Tourism Minister Dionisio d’Aguilar said yesterday he expects “things will begin to improve” in the country’s tourism industry by the third quarter of the year.
His comments came when asked for an update on the Grand Lucayan resort’s reopening date.
“The government is, of course, deciding when it should reopen,” he said. “I think that the government is very close to deciding that it should reopen. I mean obviously conditions on the ground are not ideal.”
Acknowledging the country’s leading industry has suffered blow after blow from the pandemic, he said while the country’s road to recovery will likely be “a bit bumpy” in the weeks ahead, it is expected things will get better by the third quarter.
He suggested this will be dependent on countries — particularly the US — mass vaccination efforts.
He said: “So, tourism is seemingly at the moment getting a lot of body blows. However, I’m encouraged to see that the vaccine is rolling out with a certain level of robustness in the United States. They’re up to 1.2 million jabs a day.
“So, obviously as that gets rolled out quicker and they get up to about two million a day in the next four to five to six months, the United States should by-and-large have vaccinated a lot of their population which bodes well for tourism because people will consider to travel again.
“So, the short term is probably going to be a little bit bumpy (but) as we get to the middle of the year and the third quarter of the year, I envision that things will begin to improve so that’s my projection moving forward for the rest of 2021.”
Last month, newly sworn-in US President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring travellers to produce a negative COVID-19 test before arrival in the US as well as then having to go into quarantine.
The new COVID-19 testing policy was previously announced by US officials but was later enforced on January 26.
Although the US quarantine requirement will now not be mandatory, the minister admitted that the US president’s comments on the policy had a significant impact on travel to The Bahamas.
“I spoke to a number of the operators of the major hotels in New Providence and they said that as soon as President Joe Biden floated the idea of a possible mandatory quarantine, a lot of people called up and cancelled,” he said.
“So, when the president of the United States speaks, he has an impact even though after further review and looking at it closely and probably realising that that wasn’t in his remit and that’s something that’s dealt by the state and local level and it was walked back upon.
“The impact of the comment caused confusion and so visitors were not minded to take the risk of going away and having to come back and quarantine and to be safe, they just cancelled.”
With the new impediments to travel, some observers have said the Minnis administration should capitalise on the domestic travel market, calling for current inter-island travel restrictions to be eased.
However, the minister told reporters yesterday that the government is not considering relaxing restrictions on domestic travel right now as a result of the new, more infectious strains spreading worldwide.
He also said officials are trying to limit the risk of imported cases to other Family Islands – where COVID infections are low.
Comments
ThisIsOurs 3 years, 2 months ago
Here's the kicker, all we need is one unvaccinated positive person to get on a cruise ship, turn up positive either enroute or while here and it ower. again.
At this point I believe planning for a tourist influx before 2023 is more than overly optimistic.
What we should be doing is planning for the other than tourism. Unfortunately we wasted the most valuable year talking about when we open November 2020. Now we talking about when we open in November 2021
SP 3 years, 2 months ago
With 5 decades of asinine political stupidity compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism Minister Dionisio d’Aguilar is obviously between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The biggest question for d’Aguilar now is "are we going right back to the same lousy tourism product" or will we use this time to fashion an improved frontline product"?
Jet ski's, nightlife, Bay Street & resort area hooligans, excursion tours, value for the dollar shopping, down town experience, etc' should have all been addressed, revamped, and regulated were necassary to improve Nassau as a resort destination.
Alternatively, we can sit back on our hands and wait until these areas are totally decrepet and the USA, Canada, and the EU declare Nassau a "no visit destination".
If d’Aguilar continues sticking his head in the sand like his predecessors pretending these deficientcies will simply go away like magic or correct themselves & keeps doing nothing would not surprise me. However, the country will continue to fail.
M0J0 3 years, 2 months ago
Simply put it shows they have no plan nor did they plan for the fall out.
John 3 years, 2 months ago
Corona cases in the US continue to plummet and are now at levels below pre-Trump election super spreader rallies. And note this is before many persons have even received their first dose of the vaccine snd when just a small portion of the population has received the second portion. Imagine if Trump had sought to enforce the wearing of masks and other safety measures, rather than calling the virus a hoax and even discouraging persons from wearing masks. And at least one physician says the idea that the vaccines can cause infertility in women could be more than just gossip. First off there were no tests done on women who went to full term pregnancy. In fact pregnant women were excluded from the vaccine trials and no one who has taken the vaccine have given birth as yet. This doctor believes that there can be crossover from the women’s genes and the vaccines that cause the fetus to abort or even cause the women’s body to reject the male sperm. And with Bill Gates advocating population reduction and being somewhat involved with the creation of the vaccines...
tribanon 3 years, 2 months ago
The very pig-headed D'Aguilar still just doesn't get it! Our government was never elected to, nor did it ever have the constitutional right to, unnecessarily shut down our employers, our businesses, our schools and our lives for indefinte periods of time of its own choosing with absolutely no regard whatsoever to our rights and liberties.
Many Bahamians, including our young children, who were healthy before the pandemic, have since been made physically or mentally sick by the ridiculous yo-yo lockdowns, curfews and protocols odered by a self-designated supreme ruler who has readily admitted he never knows whether he's headed east or west on the best of days.
More so than the Red China Virus itself, our grossly incompetent duo of Minnis & D'Aguilar have caused almost irreparable damage to our country’s leading industry, much to the joy of Florida and competing tourist destinations in our part of the world. The many unnecessary restrictions Minnis & D'Aguilar imposed on US and Canadian travellers only served to instigate retaliatory treatment from those two countries which have traditionally accounted for more than 85% of our tourism market.
Only Doofus Minnis and his Dingbat Poodle D'Aguilar could possibly decide it was in their political interest that our economy be decimated for years to come in a very misguided effort to protect us from the Red China Virus. This has left upwards of 100,000 Bahamians completely financially destitute, many not knowing where their next meal will come from. And we see Minnis & D'Aguilar still with no game plan whatsoever as vaccine-resistant variants of the Red China Virus loom large on our horizon.
Both Minnis & D'Aguilar need to stop listening to their Communist Chinese puppeteers, and their agents like the WHO & PAHO. Instead they should take a page out of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's playbook. Florida's economy is booming and they're devouring what was once our piece of the tourism pie. But Minnis & D'Aguilar sorely lack the vision, managerial skills and cahoonas of a Ron DeSantis. And we all now know Minnis with his rat-sized whatszits and insatiable greed for power is no leader by any strech of one's imagination.
lovingbahamas 3 years, 2 months ago
Let’s see? Do I go to Bahamas, make expensive plane reservations, pay $200 for a Covid test, pay $100+ for a “health visa”, have a panic attack about getting everything done before I have to change/cancel my reservation, get to the Bahamas and have to figure out how to get my daily email on Covid conditions to the government, pay $50 for a Covid test to get back into the US. OR, do I just go to the Florida Keys with none of the above? And, which brain surgeon minister is not allowing rapid testing instead of PCR to enter the Bahamas now? Our own government uses it on the 5th day test and the US allows it to enter. Shouldn’t we try to make it just a little easier for our visitors?
tribanon 3 years, 2 months ago
And can you as a tourist imagine getting a false positive test result shortly before your scheduled departure from the Bahamas. That certainly could prove most costly!
lovingbahamas 3 years, 2 months ago
Or how about getting a false positive in the Bahamas, not being able to get on an aircraft to the U.S., and getting to pay for 14 more nights of lodging and another test hoping it isn't false positive too.
tribanon 3 years, 2 months ago
Now that's what's called a real "Tourist Trap"!
proudloudandfnm 3 years, 2 months ago
Ron desantis?!?! Um... No. Just no. The man is insane...
tribanon 3 years, 2 months ago
He and the State he governs are eating our tourism lunch right now and are likely to continue doing so for many years to come. And if it weren't for Ron DeSantis and his influential refugee Cuban community friends in South Florida, by now Biden would have signed an executive order for the US to re-establish all diplomatic ties and normalize relations with Cuba. lol
moncurcool 3 years, 2 months ago
Are we seriously living on an assumption that just because people in the US get vaccines they will travel? Why are we sitting back and doing nothing. What may look like a catastrophic situation for us is actually an opportunity to create new industries. It seems that we are gonna waste this storm sitting down and hoping for tourist handouts to start again.
tribanon 3 years, 2 months ago
We're sitting back doing nothing because Minnis and his cohorts behave like deer caught on a dark night in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler Mack truck.
Whether it be the Hurricane Dorian disaster or the COVID-19 pandemic, Minnis will never have the necessary smarts and leadership skills to help our small nation cope with any kind of serious crisis. The double-whammy for us though is that there is one thing that he does indeed do one quite well. He's an expert like no other when it comes to making a serious crisis even worse. And he's proving that just now by the way he is mishandling just about every aspect of our nation's dire financial crisis.
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