The Caribbean tourist industry is sharply criticizing changes in U.S. rules extending the time that American cruise passengers can travel without their passports — but not those who journey by air.<\/p>\n
Bahamas tourism officials are joining in the criticism of the new changes in the U.S. passport rules. Yet it was only a few months ago that the same individuals were heralding the fact that the Bahamas is a “sovereign nation” that can do what it wants, with total disregard US policy or desires.<\/p>\n
President Bush signed the changes into law yesterday. The changes allow U.S. citizens to return from visits to Canada and Mexico, or from cruises throughout the Caribbean, without a passport until June first, 2009. But the law maintains that air travelers to those areas must carry a passport starting January eighth.<\/p>\n
Despite the partial deadline extension, Caribbean tourism officials worry about revenue loss because cruise travelers tend to spend less money in a single port than a visitor who traveled to the country by air.<\/p>\n
The new requirements will not affect travel between the U.S., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It looks like the ‘sovereign country’ rap, that was used to justify the anti-American rhetoric being spewed by Fred Mitchell and his corrupt PLP cronies, bit them in the butt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}