According to a senior Ministry of Tourism official, government hopes to have the management of Nassau International Airport in private hands “by the end of this year”.
Similar information was given to Bahamians in April when it was announced that NIA would be under new management “in a matter of months”.
It was more or less the same thing that Transport and Aviation Minister Glenys Hanna-Martin told the House two months earlier.
“In the next few months,” the minister told parliamentarians in February, “NIA will be well on its way to a complete transformation resulting in a facility that will be the envy of the region and a place of which we can all be justly proud.”
We are now told the handover should be completed before the end of the year – another two months to go.
Government has been in negotiations with Vancouver Airport Services (YVRAS), a subsidiary of a company that manages Canada’s Vancouver International Airport, ever since it announced in February that it had chosen YVRAS as the preferred bidder for the privatisation of NIA. However, the last that we heard of those negotiations, just a few weeks ago, was that they were badly bogged down.
The main problem seemed to be that YVRAS had a handshake on an agreement for the construction and management of a $250 million airport terminal that it felt was final, only to discover that new negotiators were attempting to change the terms – squeezing YVRAS to the point that the business proposition would no longer be viable.
“Everything started in good faith and everything was moving forward,” we were told, “and now these guys are trying to change the deal.”
The reference was apparently to the negotiating team under the chairmanship of Baltron Bethel of the Bahamas Hotel Corporation.
YVRAS has a 30-year contract as part of a consortium to manage and develop Sangster Airport in Kingston, Jamaica. It also operates 14 airports in five countries, including the Turks and Caicos islands.
But in the Bahamas it doesn’t seem to be able to get off the ground. With each passing day, the upgrade of NIA becomes more urgent.
Ellison “Tommy” Thompson, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Tourism, told Tribune Business last week that Nassau International Airport is “by far the biggest complaint” from visiting tourists. He referred to “the cleanliness, the facility, the big bottlenecks that are there going through US preclearance, security personnel…”
The airport’s problems are getting to the point where they are now the main topic at almost every cocktail or dinner party. It has reached such a critical stage that it is starting to affect the country’s tourist business.
Whoever did the original “handshake” that made YVRAS feel so cosy about undertaking Nassau International should re-enter the negotiations and find out what is going wrong and how quickly it can be corrected. It is critical that something be done before the end of the year.
For example, one of the two large and expensive carousels for passengers’ luggage is still idle. It has been the subject of this column many times over the years because we cannot understand such blatant waste of public funds.
The carousel is still idle. One of the porters offered the information that it has only been in service about five months of its three-year life in the Bahamas. We don’t know whether his figures are correct. But we do know that it has been out of service almost from the day of installation. We were told that its parts are now being pirated to keep the second carousel in operation.
We recall all the fanfare when these two carousels were installed. They were meant to speed luggage to arriving passengers and avoid the bottlenecks. Well the two carousels are in place, only one is operational and when several aircraft arrive at NIA at the same time, passengers waste valuable holiday time hanging around the Customs area waiting for luggage.
Meanwhile government has another important deadline to meet in January – and this is one deadline that it daren’t miss.
It must have the US mandated baggage security screening machines installed before January. If it fails, US Customs pre-clearance can be withdrawn and aircraft leaving NIA will not be allowed to land at international airports.
We are told that the CTX 9000 DSi screening machines, which must meet International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) specifications, are on order.
“They are moving forward,” a source commented, “but they are moving forward late. It would be a political disaster if they don’t meet the deadline and pre-clearance were pulled.”
Editorial from The Tribune, Nassau Bahamas
