The Bahamas government quickly reinstated the ‘Companion Flies Free’ promotion after a brief hiatis allegedly resulted in a “30 per cent reduction” in bookings at Atlantis.<\/p>\n
The promotion was originally launched last year and was responsible for keeping Bahamas tourism at an acceptable level during tough times.<\/p>\n
The program was discontinued in January, 2011, and the visitors stopped coming.\u00a0 By February, there was allegedly a 30% decline in bookings at the Bahamas’ most popular destination, the Alantis Resort on Paradise Island.<\/p>\n
The government quickly reinstated the program and the bookings, once again, started to flow.\u00a0 Director-general of tourism, David Johnson, said\u00a0 no decision has been made yet regarding whether or not the programe will continue in May.<\/p>\n
The promotion provides free airfare for one person (the companion) when two people book flights to The Bahamas and stay at a participating hotels for a minimum of four nights.\u00a0 The Bahamas government and the participating hotel split the cost of the free airfare equally.<\/p>\n
Mr Johnson admits that the program is expensive.\u00a0 It essentially pays tourists to visit the Bahamas, an unsustainable marketing strategy which costs the government and the participating hotels an average of $340 per booking.<\/p>\n
The discontinuation of the program may have contributed to the 6.1 per cent drop in hotel revenues in Nassau and Paradise Island in January and February, as recently reported by the Central Bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sadly, it appears that the only way to get lots of people to visit the Bahamas is if the government pays for their airfare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":[3],"tags":[42,109,33],"class_list":["post-7763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-airlines","tag-atlantis","tag-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7763","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}