Thanksgiving arrivals likely ‘unremarkable’, says minister

Tourism officials are expecting to get the first numbers from the Thanksgiving holiday travel period later this week, but Minister of Tourism and Aviation Dionisio D’Aguilar said he doesn’t expect anything remarkable.

Tourism officials had been anticipating a rebound in tourist arrivals around the holidays – a typically busy period.

“I don’t think it was anything remarkable. Well let me put it this way, anything better than zero is remarkable. For statistics it’s a bit early, we’re on day seven and we haven’t gotten our stats in yet to determine what happened. It’s a bit premature, but none of our major hotels are open,” D’Aguilar said.

Asked recently about foot traffic through the national gateway during the holiday weekend, Lynden Pindling International Airport (LPIA) officials would only confirm that the airport did see an uptick in passengers over the Thanksgiving weekend compared to September and October numbers, but confirmed that hard data would not be available until December 10.

Tourism officials now anticipate that numbers will climb – albeit not to pre-pandemic levels – with the reopening of Atlantis resort later this week on December 10, Baha Mar next week on December 17 and the British Colonial Hilton on December 15.

“The fact that we’re opening, those hotels are obviously doing their own marketing to grow their business. We’ve seen Atlantis marketing on television, so obviously they’re trying to get things up and running. All of that is going to attract business, but we’re going to be well off 2019 numbers,” D’Aguilar said.

“Everything is relative. As I always say, world tourism is down 70 percent so most destinations are recording a 20 to 40 percent return to business of 2019 numbers, so I guess we should hope to be in between those sort of thresholds.”

According to the current Monthly Economic and Financial Developments report from The Central Bank of The Bahamas, the most recent data provided by the Ministry of Tourism (MOT) reveals that total foreign arrivals by first port of entry were 98.6 percent less than in September 2019, extending the 12.2 percent decrease in the same period last year when Hurricane Dorian impacted.

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