Tourism emergence strategy is to wait on major tourist centers

The Bahamas’ tourism emergence strategy will largely depend on how and when the United States and Canada come out of their own COVID-19 lockdown measures, Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar said yesterday.

D’Aguilar said since the majority of tourists to The Bahamas come from those jurisdictions, The Bahamas is watching the developments in those countries and how they emerge from the pandemic very closely.

“The first thing to recognize is that 82 percent of our foreign visitors come from the United States and another seven percent come from Canada, so almost 90 percent of all of our foreign visitors come from those two countries. So, we have to first wait for them to get on the other side of this. And in Canada, you’re still probably experiencing lockdowns in a number of provinces and of course the largest source of our foreign visitors is New York and Florida, but they come from all states in the United States,” he said during a live interview with John Kirk, president of Canadian media company Travel Pulse Canada.

“So we sort of have to wait for the United States to get on the other side of this, not only to stop the lockdown and open up, but to get people re-employed. So they have a large amount of people that are unemployed, their GDP has gone down significantly, so I don’t think people are going to have on their mind, even on the other side of this, that they want to go on vacation.”

The overarching strategy revolves around how the Ministry of Tourism can attract those millions of people who may have been laid off and are in the middle of a recession to The Bahamas, the minister indicated.

To this end, D’Aguilar said the hotels and ports are collaborating with cruise lines and airlines on a strategy to ensure people are comfortable when it’s time to “pull the trigger”.

“There are two considerations. The first is, how do we attract people to our country, giving them the feeling genuinely that this is a safe country to visit? And secondly and more important as a politician is, how do we ensure our people that when the foreign visitors come here they’re not going to make them sick? So, we’re looking at all of the protocols, we’re learning from other destinations,” he said.

“You know you only have to go on the internet and see what Singapore is doing and what Dubai is doing. Are they testing people before they come? How are they getting people into their airports, into a taxi and into their hotels safely? How are they rolling out social distancing? Tourism is a contact sport and there’s a lot of closeness involved and it’s those personal touches that people look for. It’s not just a room, a taxi and a hotel. It’s that interaction with a Bahamian that makes the vacation special. So, how do you do that safely and have our foreign visitors that come here feel that it’s going to be safe?”

Since the public state of emergency was announced last month, the government has estimated it has lost about 70 percent of revenue anticipated during this period.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/2020/04/29/tourism-emergence-strategy-is-to-wait-on-major-tourist-centers/