The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

In case anyone is interested, Jamaica is currently teaching a master class in how to manage tourism during the uncertainties of quick-changing Covid-19 protocols.

While we scream and lobby for the US to give us some sort of special treatment, Jamaica has made no such public posturing. They are too busy adapting to the new rules coming out of the US, Canada and the United Kingdom.

We want some sort of accommodation from the US to their new policy requiring everyone entering the country to produce a recent negative Covid test.

On the same day that the new US policy took effect, Jamaica’s tourism minister announced that 30 hotels on his island were staffed and equipped to provide free Covid testing for guests at their properties as quickly as 24 hours before they return home.

Jamaica’s Ministry of Health helped a total of 10 private laboratories to enhance their testing capabilities to support the hotels and their two airports.

They put test sample collection centres around the island to provide a seamless process for tourists at other properties outside of the 30 on-site hotels.

Said their tourism minister: “We are resilient and will remain nimble, especially over the coming weeks, as we anticipate other potential changes for United States travellers.”

It should be noted that Jamaica gets almost twice as many tourists as we do. We have about 15,000 hotel rooms across all the islands. Jamaica has 34,000 hotel rooms with plans to reach 50,000 rooms this decade.

There is a national effort underway in Jamaica called the “Sugarcane Project” whose momentum was slowed but not stopped by Covid. That alone will add 5,000 new hotel rooms.

We tend to be dismissive of Jamaica’s awesome advantage by drawing on the fact that we get five million cruise ship passengers a year while Jamaica gets only 1.5 million. But everyone knows that stopover air visitors are where the money is.

We do punch above our weight in terms of tourist spend. On average a Bahamas vacation is much more expensive than a Jamaican holiday. But the added visitor arrivals gave Jamaica US$3.6 billion in 2019.

Because we charge more for our hotel rooms, we actually make more money per visitor. We could do much better if we had more budget priced hotels and will when we finally get the hotel room stock on Grand Bahama back up to scratch.

But Bahamian ownership in our hotel sector lags far behind the Jamaican ownership in theirs. While there is significant foreign direct investment in Jamaican hotels, there is also more local ownership of hotels in Jamaica than in the Bahamas. Topping that list is, of course, the Sandals Resorts.

We need a new master plan for national tourism development, one that blends our super luxury resorts with budget hotels and one that allows for unobtrusive, environmentally friendly, Bahamian-owned boutique hotels sprinkled around the Family Islands.

Bahamian-owned could be combined with foreign-managed. Branding and other licensing agreements could give smaller resorts access to superior advertising and promotional muscle while retaining ownership and earnings.

The Bahamas cannot and should not turn its back on the cruise ship industry. We earn money from many of these ships that are registered here. But we need to be more realistic about how cruising should fit into our national tourism plan post Covid.

This could mean that Nassau gets rostered out of ship rotations in favour of the Robinson Crusoe experience that private islands provide. The ships might leave Miami as a Covid-free sterile bubble, but they will lose that status at the first port of call when passengers file off and mingle with the local population.

The Bahamas stands to benefit from our ability to offer sterile corridors to our equally sterile private islands. But it won’t fill the coffers of merchants on Bay Street who will have to shift their business model, perhaps by opening a John Bull store in the shopping promenade onboard the ships.

Or they could sell their perfumes, trinkets and luxury products online and have the goods delivered to the private island for collection by passengers.

Cruising will come back if only because some packages will be sold at rock-bottom prices. But the bigger threat to the industry will be the pressure from environmentalists for them to fully transition to clean marine propulsion technology, pollutant filters and more efficient vessels. More investment in ships will drive up cruise prices.

The gist of the story is that the dynamics of a changing tourism industry is happening all around us. If we stick to pre-Covid business-as-usual, we will be relegated to the second tier of holiday destinations.

Our Ministry of Tourism needs to be bold. Cuba may have pioneered this industry in the 1950s, but it was our own brashness and cockiness that got us noticed on the world stage. We confidently bragged that it is better in the Bahamas and the world took notice.

Two hundred years ago the German intellectual Wolfgang von Goethe summed up a rationale for boldness that could serve us well in 2021: “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

We triple dare tourism officials to stop whining and be bold.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

January 27, 2021