The Bahamas could see a rebound of more than four million tourist arrivals this year, given Minister of Tourism and Aviation Dionisio D’Aguilar’s projection that the destination should be at 60 percent of where it was in 2019.
The Bahamas saw a historic 7.25 million foreign visitor arrivals in 2019. A return to 60 percent of that level would be a significant boost from the 1.79 million total foreign visitors in 2020, when global travel came to a standstill and the tourism sector contracted by nearly 80 percent.
“We’re projecting a significant rebound. I don’t know where the number will lie but as the year goes on, certainly by Christmas and with nothing else impacting that, we should be back to about 60 percent of where we were in 2019,” D’Aguilar told the Rotary Club of South East Nassau during its virtual meeting yesterday.
“It’s all a bit of a crystal ball now, people are making last-minute decisions now so it’s hard to predict.”
Since tourism reopened fully in November, there has been steady month-over-month growth in the number of foreign visitors traveling to the country.
April saw the highest visitor arrival numbers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and D’Aguilar projected May’s numbers to be even higher.
“In November we had about 14,000 visitors purchase a health visa and that’s how I’m kind of tracking it. In December we had 32,000, in January we had 21,000, because that was the month President Joe Biden said everyone returning will have to quarantine and that got everyone a little jittery. In February we had 28,000 and then in March we bumped up to 60,000. In April, we’re up to 64,000. In May I project it will be in the mid-70,000, so the trajectory is starting to go back up,” he said.
D’Aguilar said there has been an increase in hotel bookings, with occupancy levels rising steadily from the low teen percentages registered in December, to being somewhere around 30 percent.
“Speaking to the hotels, the big ones – Baha Mar and Atlantis – they’re reporting to me that the pace of their bookings at least for the summer is encouraging. The pace is faster than it was in 2019, but that doesn’t mean they’ll have the same occupancy. But the point is people are interested and people are looking for an opportunity to travel. And luckily for us the United States has done an excellent job at rolling out its vaccines,” he said.
“So as people are getting vaccinated, so too they are being emboldened to travel. So we are very encouraged by the numbers that are coming out of the United States, our core market.”
D’Aguilar continued, “But the bread and butter, 75 percent of our foreign arrivals come into Nassau, so Nassau is key and the bigger hotels are the huge generators. They started off in the ten to 15 percent occupancy range and they are probably now in the 30 percent range. But clearly they haven’t rebounded.”
The slow return in hotel occupancy numbers coincides with the more than 60 percent growth in the short-term vacation rental market registered in March this year, according to the most recent data from vacation rental data and insights company AirDNA.
“One component of our tourism arrivals that have seemingly not been affected or not as significantly impacted by COVID-19 is the high-end niche travelers, the wealthy people. They have been coming here in droves on their private jets, on their private yachts and that component of the tourism arrivals market has been less impacted by COVID-19,” he said.
“Rich people have ways to navigate easily all these restrictions we have in place and so we have done very well in that regard from those arrivals, so much so that I was at one high-end boutique hotel over Christmas and the managing director told me that Christmas 2020 was better than Christmas 2019 on the room revenue side, obviously not on the food and beverage side, because you couldn’t have parties and all that sort of stuff. But that market has been very resilient.”
The post Sixty percent of 2019 arrival numbers by Christmas, projects D’Aguilar appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/sixty-percent-of-2019-arrival-numbers-by-christmas-projects-daguilar/
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