By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Total stopover visitors to the Bahamas grew by 4.9 per cent year-over-year in 2014, with senior Baha Mar officials yesterday pledging a further “significant increase” in this growth rate once the $3.5 billion project opens.

Ministry of Tourism data obtained by Tribune Business shows that air (stopover) arrivals to the whole Bahamas were up by almost 43,000 last year, growing from 1.281 million in 2013 to 1.343 million.

This increase, though, was largely driven by the Memories resort’s opening on Grand Bahama, which drove a 43 per cent increase in the island’s stopover visitor numbers - from 89,475 in 2013 to 127,944 last year.

Growth elsewhere, though, was more subdued, with New Providence’s stopover arrivals essentially flat year-over-year - up just 1.8 per cent from 987,584 to 1.005 million.

As for the Family Islands, stopover visitors increased by 3 per cent to 209,764, up from 203,677 in 2013.

While the relatively flat New Providence performance appears discouraging at first sight, it also could be said to represent a ‘glass half full’ scenario.

This is because significant room inventory was ‘off-line’ in 2014, prior to coming back into the accommodation pool in 2015. Apart from Baha Mar’s 2,200 new rooms (more than enough to replace the now-closed Wyndham), New Providence is set to benefit from the re-opening of the former Nassau Palm and Paradise Island Harbour Resorts this year.

The latter is set to be rebranded as a Holiday Inn, while the latter will re-open under its new owner, Warwick International.

Robert Sands, Baha Mar’s senior vice-president of government and external affairs, told Tribune Business that the $3.5 billion project’s opening would drive further growth - and at a faster pace - in New Providence’s and the Bahamas’ total stopover arrivals.

“We hope we have a major impact with stopovers after our first year of operations,” Mr Sands told Tribune Business. “We should see those numbers increase significantly as a result of opening.

“We’re looking at an increase of anywhere from 350,000 to 400,000 stopover visitors in a fully stable year.

“We have part of the year this year, so it’s difficult to say how this will impact for the remaining months of the year, but we will see a significant increase.”

Stopover visitor numbers are extremely important to tourism’s Bahamian economic impact, as they are far higher yielding that cruise ship passengers, spending around $2,000 per head during their vacations.

The economic ‘trickle down’ effect from stopover visitors is thus far greater but, yet, again, cruise ship passengers accounted for 78.7 per cent - or 4.977 million - of the Bahamas’ total 6.32 million tourists in 2014.

Mr Sands, meanwhile, said Baha Mar would “have more than sufficient staff in place to meet the demands of March 27”, when its $3.5 billion project finally opens its doors.

“It’s fair to say we have multiple hundreds of people training,” he told Tribune Business, estimating that Baha Mar was currently preparing around 2,000 persons in-house for a variety of roles.

He added that the developer was still “pushing” for extra airlift to meet the anticipated demand for its resorts, adding that “there’s never an end game to that”.

Explaining that airlift was a function of visitor demand, which was in turn driven by an increase in available hotel room supply, Mr Sands added: “Air access determines hotel occupancies; both work hand in hand.”