• Rivals forge ahead offering visitors COVID vaccine

• Resorts enjoy 20% pt room night, revenue uptick

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Bahamians are endangering their jobs, incomes and families through resistance to taking the COVID-19 vaccine, a senior tourism official warned yesterday in urging: “Step up to the plate and get it done.”

Kerry Fountain, the Out Islands Promotion Board’s executive director, told Tribune Business that the economy’s post-pandemic rebound and international competitiveness could be threatened if persons became too focused on the debate over companies seeking to make vaccination mandatory for their employees.

Arguing that The Bahamas was getting hung-up on the “legalities” of such policies, Mr Fountain said other major destinations were already far ahead in their approach. In particular, he cited Alaska, which is providing the COVID-19 vaccine to all visitors, as an example of how rivals are exploiting the pandemic to obtain a competitive advantage.

Warning that workers could undermine their employers and, ultimately, their own livelihoods by refusing to become inoculated without good reason, Mr Fountain said Bahamians needed to choose between economic revival and returning to pre-COVID living standards or “going back on the employment line”.

He revealed that these issues were occurring just as the Promotion Board’s member hotels were witnessing “light at the end of the tunnel”, with projected room nights sold and room revenues for the 2021 first half now projected to increase by around 20 percentage points against 2019 comparatives when measured against earlier forecasts.

Warning that this “positive trajectory” could be undermined by the latest surge in COVID-19 infections in The Bahamas, Mr Fountain reiterated that the pace and strength of the tourism industry’s rebound - and that of the wider economy - remains dependent on keeping case numbers “under control” as well as the continued vaccine roll-our here and in major tourism source markets.

“We have the benefit that the positive trajectory will continue as long as we can keep the COVID-19 pandemic under control,” he told this newspaper of the improved projections. “We know we have challenges because of how the US is experiencing a fourth surge, and we in The Bahamas are experiencing a third surge.

“It’s very important that the distribution of the vaccine, and the pace at which the distribution is done in the US and in The Bahamas, it’s very important those persons who have access to the vaccine step up to the plate and get it done.

“I see on the news and in the dailies [newspapers] there’s talk of some companies wanting to make it mandatory for workers to get the vaccine, and I see they are facing some headwinds from a legal perspective.

“What I’m seeing from here [in the US] and reading, the state of Alaska, if you visit their destination they state they will be providing you with the vaccine as a visitor regardless of whether you are a visitor. While in The Bahamas we are debating whether or not to take the vaccine, their destination is giving out the vaccine because it gives them a competitive advantage,” Mr Fountain added.

“On the one hand we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to be legal, or do we want to take the vaccine as a way of bringing income to the family household? Do we continue to say we don’t want to take the vaccine because it’s my legal right but, at the same time, you’re not giving your place of employment a competitive advantage?

“If we don’t have a competitive advantage, and the hotels, restaurants and tour vendors are not making money, they’re going to close shop. We have to decide where we want to be. Do we want to live to the same standard, or do we want to go back on the employment [unemployment] line.”

Mr Fountain, who is based in the US, said The Bahamas’ rebound from COVID-19’s economic devastation depends on both the actions it takes and the vaccination roll-out in its core visitor source markets of the US, Canada and the UK/Europe.

Calling on this country and its citizens/residents to do their part, he reiterated: “In The Bahamas, if you’re eligible to take the vaccine and have access to the vaccine, then get it done. Not only for financial reasons but health reasons. That’s at home.

“Over here in the US, although we’ve had some hiccups with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the goal is to get as many US adults vaccinated as soon as possible. They’ve dropped the eligible age to 16. The more Americans get vaccinated, the quicker you achieve herd immunity, and the quicker you reach herd immunity the quicker you get back to business in the new normal.”

Back in The Bahamas, John Pinder, the director of labour, trade union leaders and attorneys have all warned that employers making it mandatory for workers to take the COVID-19 vaccine if they want to retain their jobs is illegal and has no basis in the constitution.

The controversy was sparked by Sushi Rokkan, an Old Fort Bay Town Centre restaurant owned by Michael Scott QC and his wife, informing its 40-strong workforce that valid medical grounds were the only acceptable reason for not taking the vaccine. Employees who refused to do so for other reasons could be reassigned to other roles or lose their jobs entirely, workers were told.

Mr Fountain, though, is effectively arguing that this controversy is a sideshow and distraction from the urgent need to bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end, and the only way for The Bahamas to achieve this remains mass vaccination.

Meanwhile, the Out Island Promotion Board chief said The Bahamas had begun to convert interest into actual bookings and business as travel demand slowly ramped up. He recalled how the Board, at its early February meeting, saw visitor traffic to its website in the November/December 2020 and January/February 2021 was close to matching pre-pandemic levels from the prior year.

“We saw definite interest in our business,” Mr Fountain said. “You’re trying to convert lookers, people browsing on the website, to bookers. We were not seeing the conversion rates we wanted.”

Describing room nights sold and room revenues as key hotel performance indicators, the Board’s February meeting projected these would be 42 percent and 46 percent of 2019 levels, respectively, for member resorts for the 2021 first quarter at its February meeting.

However, the announcement by US president Joe Biden that the US was seeking to distribute 100m COVID-19 vaccines, and its subsequent beating of that target, appears to have unlocked the travel market.

“Prior to that, what we saw was a bunch of people searching and looking,” Mr Fountain said, “but not converting to bookings. In the third week of February and early March, that’s when bookings picked up. 

“It picked up such that at the early April meeting, we’re projecting for room nights sold and room revenue for the January to June period, that room nights sold will be at 65 percent of 2019 levels and room revenues will be 62 percent of what they were compared to January to June 2019.

“Definitely now we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel, and we believe that’s primarily due to the roll-out of the COVID vaccine across the US.... It’s not really where we wanted to be in terms of 2019, but it is a positive sign.”