A senior tourism official yesterday said that the sheer number of arrivals to ports in the Bahamas reflected surging growth in the worldwide cruise and voating industry, rather than a downward trend in air arrivals or overnight visitor stays.
In an interview with The Tribune, Tyrone Sawyer, director of Airlift Development for the Ministry of Tourism, said strong cruise arrival numbers, with 71 per cent of visitors to the Bahamas in 2004 coming by sea was not a position the industry wants to throw away.
“It’s a good thing and we don’t want to discourage that, but we also want to make sure to have a balance between the amount of airlift coming in and the amount of rooms we can accommodate,” he added.
Mr. Sawyer said it was the global travel and vacation market, to a large extent, which dictated the percentage of air arrivals versus sea arrivals. The Ministry of Tourism, along with industry stakeholders, had always focused on increasing incrementally air arrivals to the Bahamas because of the level of expenditure by visitors who stay overnight.
The tourism industry is not faced with an ‘either or’ proposition, Mr. Sawyer said, because both cruise and airline travel are a necessary part of a growing industry.
Source: Yolanda Deleveaux, The Tribune
