Ministry of Tourism seeking to increase airlift as major hotels resume operations

After Atlantis President Audrey Oswell lamented airlift challenges for guests booking and arriving to the property, the Ministry of Tourism said yesterday it is working closely with its airline partners to increase seats to The Bahamas during this winter season.

Senior Director of Airlift Development in the Ministry of Tourism Tyrone Sawyer said while the increase in airline seats is going to be driven by the overall demand for the destination, the Ministry of Tourism’s airline partners have enough confidence in The Bahamas as a destination that they are already increasing seat capacity for early 2021.

“We have had some very meaningful and encouraging conversations with basically all of our airline partners who are positioning themselves to bring more airlift over the upcoming winter period going into the spring,” Sawyer told Guardian Business yesterday.

“The airlines themselves are taking steps to stabilize themselves financially. So you have in spite of that a scenario where we’re seeing airlift return from our key major gateways by most of our airline partners. And they have quite a bit of confidence that demand is going to pick up over the next three months to the extent that they have increases in the amount of seats that they plan to bring going into 2021.”

Last week, on the day Atlantis opened for the first time since March, Oswell said even though the resort opened with a slow start, bookings for the month of December have been higher than was projected.

Sawyer said airlift followed the same trend, starting off slow when tourism reopened on November 15 and continuously growing.

“It’s ramping back up. We’ve got quite a bit of non-stop airlift coming in. We’ve got Delta coming in from Atlanta. We’ve got United coming in from Newark, we have a new flight coming in from JetBlue from Newark and we’ve got American Airlines from Charlotte, North Carolina into Nassau,” he said.

“We’ve got quite a bit of non-stop airlift and once again it’s going to be driven by the actual demand for the destination, the excitement for the destination. And that is happening as we speak, as the airlines are positioning themselves to bring more seat capacity as it’s needed.”

The tourism and hospitality industries were one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic after global travel came to a screeching halt in the early months of the pandemic, forcing the closure of hotels and resorts worldwide.

Airlines, cruise and hotel corporations have projected as much as a 70 percent drop in revenues. Where some hotels remained open, they were rarely at capacity.

Sawyer said given the state of global tourism, he still believes The Bahamas is “in a very good place”.

“The fact that Atlantis – and this is feedback that we would have gotten from our airline partners as well – and Baha Mar are reopening helps to build the consumer demand to help fill those flights. What you’re seeing is a lot of our airline partners themselves have been impacted economically by COVID-19. In some cases they are reducing their overall staff compliment,” he said.

“We’re going through a pandemic and I would say we’re in a very good place. We’re in a very good place based upon the economic situation in which we find ourselves.”

The Bahamian economy’s recovery relies heavily on the robust return of tourism, however economists have projected that tourism numbers won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until 2022.

Sawyer is more optimistic.

“We’re making efforts to stimulate consumer demand through the Ministry of Tourism’s marketing efforts and through the marketing efforts of our key hotel partners. That’s going to be the real driver of airlift growth going into the future,” he said.

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