Mark off another week of disrupted revenue flow for the airline industry serving The Bahamas. On Monday JetBlue Airways announced that effective today it was “waiving its change fees and differences to allow customers with reservations for travel to or from Nassau, The Bahamas and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, Florida.”
The waiver allows JetBlue’s customers who have reservations to “rebook their travel which needs to be completed on or before Saturday, September 24,” to avoid what JetBlue’s press release referred to as “inclement weather expected in the area.”
A Caribbean Tourism Organisation survey completed in August – before the current spate of “inclement weather” – had industry experts writing off the rest of the season. Although hoteliers were looking ahead to the 2006 season and being encouraged by bookings,
Katrina and the subsequent storms/hurricanes – Ophelia and Rita – will bring some revaluation downward of the tourism outlook for The Bahamas and the region.
The pricing model – charging more per head in the bed – cannot be sustained indefinitely. And although little has been said about it, part of the recovery of the south-east USA will have to include a more robust U.S. domestic tourism.
The remaining 72 days of the hurricane season will be significant not only for what may happen but more importantly, the hurricane season’s physical and psychological effect upon the tourism industry in 2005 and well into 2006.
A full year after Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances swept through Grand Bahama, its economy remains hobbled. The tourism sector in particular is sufficiently crippled to have the government suggesting that it will undertake a proven failed development strategy – namely government ownership of hotels – in the hopes of reviving Grand Bahama’s lagging economy.
As JetBlue seeks to accommodate its customers, so will the more savvy hoteliers who will have to offer their customers, particularly those from the Southeast U.S., the kinds of attractive packages that may have to include lower prices.
And if the trend to declining numbers continues in 2006 – 2005 was already running lower than 2004 before Katrina – the hoped for rebound may not happen in 2006. Rebuilding Louisiana and the other parts of the U.S. may not reclaim the 400,000 lost jobs that came in the wake of Katrina and this too will affect people’s ability to take vacations, especially as U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow admitted that the U.S. economy will slow by half a percentage point. Other analysts are predicting a shrinkage by as much as one per cent.
By C. E. HUGGINS, Nassau Guardian Senior Writer
