After a six-month hiatus, public access to visitor arrival numbers on the Ministry of Tourism\u2019s website is finally being restored \u2014 a transparency that had disappeared without explanation.<\/p>\n
Calls to Minister of Tourism Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace went unanswered last week.<\/p>\n
The situation is of great importance as the public awaits a much-promised Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that would give the Bahamian people access to public documents and information.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham has publicly promised to introduce the FOIA within his five years in office.<\/p>\n
The six-month absence of information may demonstrate the need for other avenues for the public to access this information.\u00a0 Before this latest update, the website featured data up to December 2010, with not one update or post done for 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Public access to tourism statistics has finally been restored after suddenly disappearing six months ago, with no information being reported for 2011 – the stats are a barometer for the economic health of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"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":[40,168,33,73],"class_list":["post-9871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-government","tag-politics-2","tag-tourism","tag-travel-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9871","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\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}