With visitor arrivals and expenditure exceeding the mid-1990 levels, Secretary General of the Caribbean Tourism Organization Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace believes that the biggest threat to The Bahamas as those numbers continue to grow is complacency.
Mr. Vanderpool-Wallace, former director general of Bahamas Tourism, made that observation during a recent interview with the Bahama Journal.
“I think one of the good things about The Bahamas is that more and more people recognise that it is the regional leader in terms of understanding tourism and acting on that understanding to continue to improve it.
“And so, I see the biggest threat would be complacency. Somehow, you believe youﾒve reached certain levels and therefore begin to ease up. The good news is that I donﾒt see that happening. But itﾒs a very simple formula ﾖ to make sure that the visitor experience gets better and better each time. And so, they leave going back home, telling other people what a fabulous time they had. And that is the most important thing.”
He said the overall focus should be to grow in both areas ﾖ numbers as well as visitor satisfaction.
“Thatﾒs the great magic. As the numbers begin to grow, the more successful you become, the greater the threat of complacency,” he said.
“So someone has to go out there and remind people that weﾒre not perfect, there are lots of areas that we must continue to improve on and hereﾒs what we are doing to improve upon it. Letﾒs see if that had any effect. If it didnﾒt letﾒs put a new programme together to continue to improve on it. So, itﾒs a much more business like approach to making sure that visitor satisfaction continues to grow.”
The Ministry of Tourismﾒs 2005 Exit Survey indicated that 81 percent of the countryﾒs stopover visitors said they were likely to return to The Bahamas in one to five years. Some 13,473 visitors completed the survey.
Half (50.4 percent) of those interviewed indicated that it was “very likely” that they would return on a vacation to The Bahamas within that period.
A further 30.3 percent said that it was “somewhat likely” that they would return.
Those numbers are down from those recorded in 2004ﾒs survey.
At that time, 88 percent of the countryﾒs stopover visitors indicated that they were likely to recommend the destination to friends and relatives.
More than half (59 percent) of those visitors indicated that they were “very likely” to recommend The Bahamas.
A further 30 percent of the stopover visitors indicated that they were “somewhat likely” to recommend The Bahamas to friends or relatives. An estimated 13,886 completed that survey.
In both surveys the major concerns continued to be high prices, poor value for money, litter (primarily in the Family Islands), hotel dissatisfaction and the poor attitudes of the people.
But according to Mr. Vanderpool-Wallace, such figures are not all doom and gloom.
“The last time I looked at the numbers, the total proportion of visitors who leave The Bahamas saying they had a great time was fairly high,” he said.
“It was nowhere near where you want it to get in order to have some kind of sustainability. So making sure that you continue to work on those people who are dissatisfied is absolutely critical.”
The secretary general also commented on the billion-dollar Baha Mar Cable Beach development and Kerzner Internationalﾒs expanding project on Paradise Island.
CEO of Kerzner International, Butch Kerzner initially expressed concerns about Baha Mar going after the same high-end market as Atlantis, but later said Kerzner is focused on making its plans a success and was not concerned about the pending competition.
Mr. Vanderpool-Wallace said The Bahamas would do well to offer a multiplicity of high-end properties.
“While you may have very large numbers of people who may come just to enjoy The Bahamas, at the end of the day, weﾒre in this business in order to make sure that we are extracting the maximum economic benefits from some of these kinds of things,” he told the Bahama Journal.
“So, really the fact is if we have these two resorts in a Nassau/Paradise Island area, we hope they are not competing against themselves. We have to understand that when customers go where they decide to, they are selecting from a variety of high-end resorts. Why shouldnﾒt we have the larger choice of those high-end resorts for people to come to so that we make sure we continue to be far more competitive?”
According to the CTO secretary general, a concern would arise if The Bahamas were a very small destination somewhere else.
“Long term, I think the idea is to recognize that it is Baha Mar and Atlantis against the rest of the world,” he said. “And thatﾒs what itﾒs really all about.”
By: Macushla N. Pinder, The Bahama Journal
