The Tribune

GLENYS Hanna Martin comes to her new portfolio with many of the attributes and skills needed to serve as Minister of Tourism, though she will have a learning curve to better understand the complexities and nuances of the sector, which is one of the largest global industries.

A scion of Arthur and Beryl Hanna, she is nationalist and a progressive who genuinely seeks to empower Bahamians. She is not in politics to enrich herself.

Having served in cabinet and government for decades, the Member of Parliament for Englerston knows politics and how government’s function and often fail. Highly intelligent, she is a quick read and study, with a curious mind.

Hanna Martin turns 69 this year. Age brings a certain freedom, combining life experience with the urgency and limits of time and, hopefully, the corresponding ambition and willpower needed to help transform tourism in The Bahamas. Her decisions will reveal whether she wants to be a transformer or a plodder.

There is another freedom Hanna Martin should utilize: the Department of Tourism is not hobbled by the strictures of the civil service, though there are some similar mindsets and overly bureaucratic walls that will have to be bulldozed. She should use this freedom, making essential personnel, operational, and financial changes in the department if she wants her agenda to move forward.

The first female tourism minister is a welcome relief from the unserious, constantly profiling former minister, Chester Cooper, who failed in many areas of the tourism brief. His giddy trumpeting of cruise passengers was a distraction from the low single-digit increase in stopover visitors domestically, while other Caribbean jurisdictions were realizing double-digit increases. He also mostly failed in improving our product and services in various areas.

The most consequential and welcome change in portfolios after the recent general election has been the swap between Ministers Cooper and Hanna Martin. Her thoughts on the seismic task is a good start, but will require big and bold decisions:

“The future of tourism development must be measured not only by the number of visitors we welcome, but by the number of Bahamians empowered to own, create, lead and prosper within the industry.  The vision is to shift from measuring tourism success primarily by arrivals to measuring it by local economic participation, Bahamian ownership and wealth creation...

“Many destinations have learned that increasing arrivals does not on its own increase prosperity. The Bahamas already attracts high-spending visitors, so the work before us is to maximise local capture of that spending. The question we must keep asking is how much value each visitor generates and how much of every tourism dollar stays in the local economy.”

Of course, the number and quality of stopover visitors matters.

Hanna Martin has publicly indicated the need to focus far more on these visitors, who deliver 90 percent of the spending by all visitor,s and 90 percent of the tourism jobs. It’s ludicrous to equate the contribution of a cruise passenger who spends seven hours on land in Nassau or Freeport with the visitor who spends seven days at the Four Seasons Ocean Club.

The former minister’s endless boasting of the increase in cruise passengers allowed him to obscure the reality that in the more economically valuable stopover visitor segment, The Bahamas was one of the worst performing countries in our region when comparing 2019 stopovers to 2025.

Hanna Martin should continue to gather those in the public and private sectors who can provide her with best advice about how to improve year-round hotel occupancies to deliver increases in year-round full-time employment and improved incomes for scores of Bahamians.

According to one tourism expert, over the past 20 years, excluding the COVID-affected years, on average, there were more that 35 percent of our hotel rooms vacant every night, with much of that vacancy in the Family Islands.

Meanwhile, the cruise ships, each with approximately 2000-plus cabins, are averaging more than 90 percent occupancy. Higher occupancies and higher room rates also happen to be the best lure for prospective local and foreign investors.

In the September 2025, report of the Bahamas National Statistical Institute, the minister will find hidden among the number of employed that 30 percent indicated that they are working only part time. If a hotel worker is not employed for a full week, they cannot bring home a full week’s pay, which exacerbates their cost-of-living struggle.

As Hanna Martin seeks to boost stopover numbers and with a booming number of cruise passengers, she knows that we have to focus on our tourism product on multiple levels, which will be one of her biggest tasks.

Last month, Melissa DaSilva, Deputy CEO and Chief Sales Officer, of TTC Tour Brands wrote, “Marketing can accelerate demand, but the product is what creates it.”

She insisted: “At the end of the day, travel advisors don’t sell marketing. They sell a product. And when a product is truly differentiated, everything else gets easier. Word of mouth grows. Repeat business grows. Loyalty grows.

“Advisors sell with more confidence because they’re offering something people genuinely want and an experience they will remember. That’s why I believe one of the biggest mistakes companies make is assuming growth starts with marketing. It doesn’t.”

In 2002, when he was Director General of Tourism, Vincent Vanderpool Wallace offered the same analysis in an interview with Fast Company.

The article began with a teaser: “How do you help an island paradise deliver on its promise to visitors? Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace understood that the Bahamas was much better at attracting tourists than at pleasing them once they arrived: ‘It’s the experience, stupid.’

When asked, “What needed an overhaul? he replied: “The approach to tourism development in our country and the thinking of the ‘experts’ in the tourism industry all appeared to be enamored of fancy advertising campaigns, which were easy to change, instead of focusing on the delivery of quality products and quality experiences.

“We were also convinced that the world-famous slogan ‘It’s Better in The Bahamas’ detracted from the need to make the necessary changes in ourselves, so we dropped it because our citizens believed it more than our visitors. If we were to change, we had to believe that The Bahamas had to be better still.”

If we want such change today, we have to honestly ask how we can be better still. This is the challenge and opportunity facing Hanna Martin and The Bahamas in transforming tourism and boosting economic growth?

More, next week.