• Minister eyes 80% of 2019 tourism levels by winter

• But ‘walking on egg shells’ over vaccine reluctance

• So govt ‘will take COVID inoculation to the people’

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A Cabinet minister yesterday said he is targeting one million stopover tourist arrivals for 2021 but acknowledged that COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy remains “the elephant in the room” for this ambition.

Dionisio D’Aguilar, minister of tourism and aviation, told Tribune Business that the government will have to be more aggressive in persuading Bahamians to become inoculated so that this nation can avoid infection “spikes” such as the one that dampened Bimini’s US Independence holiday business the past weekend.

Suggesting that the government will “have to take the vaccine to the people, if the people do not come to the vaccine”, he argued that The Bahamas “doesn’t have that much time” to improve inoculation rates if it wants to sustain its present tourism and economic rebound while remaining competitive with rival destinations.

Mr D’Aguilar said the general reluctance to become vaccinated against COVID-19 meant The Bahamas was continuing to “walk on egg shells” when it came to surges in case numbers that could result in it being downgraded by health authorities in major tourist source markets, such as the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Nevertheless, the minister said he was aiming for The Bahamas to recover 80 percent of the stopover tourism business it enjoyed during 2019’s record-breaking arrivals year by the Christmas/New Year holiday season and 2022 first quarter.

He based his optimism on the continued monthly uptick in stopover arrivals that saw foreign visitors purchase some 131,000 health travel visas in June, representing a figure that was 30 percent below the 187,029 that visited The Bahamas in the same month during June 2019.

Despite the 56,000-plus difference, Mr D’Aguilar said the gap between this year’s and 2019’s performance was narrowing every month, with May having been off by 37 percent, as the economy’s re-opening and vaccination roll-outs in tourist source markets continue to maintain pace.

“It was 131,000 in June and is increasing every month,” he told this newspaper of stopover visitor arrivals. “It was 22,000 in January, 30,000 in February, 64,000 in March, 68,000 in April and 110,000 in May, so every month it has gone up. It’s keeping in line, and every month it’s ticking up.

“We’re bouncing back. I spoke to all the hotel operators, Atlantis and Baha Mar, and they had a very good holiday weekend with high occupancies and are very upbeat about their booking engines. They’re demonstrating that the pace of growth in visitors coming in is outpacing what they were doing in 2019. In the Family Islands, they’re very positive and upbeat about the next four to six weeks.”

With The Bahamas continuing to benefit from pent-up demand in its key US travel market, Mr D’Aguilar added: “I always figured we’d get one million stopover visitors [this year]. That’s kind of my target. At the end of June we had 400,000-plus, 425,000, so I’m hoping for the second half of the year, although we may have weather events and September and October are traditionally slow months.”

Achieving the minister’s goal would only see The Bahamas attract 55.6 percent of the 1.8m stopovers who came to these shores in 2019, but Mr D’Aguilar indicated his belief that sufficient momentum will build during the second half to translate into a strong winter season. “I’m aiming for 80 percent of what we did in 2019. Let’s pray we have no weather events,” he added of the 2021-2022 winter peak.

However, with less than 25 percent of The Bahamas’ estimated population receiving one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine to-date, this nation still has a long way to travel to reach the 75-80 percent level regarded as critical to achieving so-called ‘herd immunity’ against the virus.

Low inoculation levels could retard The Bahamas’ ability to fully re-open its tourism industry and wider economy, and Mr D’Aguilar yesterday reiterated that this remains a key concern for policymakers.

“It’s the hesitancy and reluctance of the vaccine uptake, and what it’s doing is making us very susceptible to spikes in cases,” he told Tribune Business. “These spikes can have a real dampener on the destination, especially if it leads to changes in the US CDC rankings and the UK’s ‘green, amber, red’ ratings.

“That’s our only fear. That’s the elephant in the room. You’re walking on egg shells every day that you don’t get spikes in numbers. It manifested itself in Bimini, where we had a spike again and they did not benefit from Crystal Cruises’ first voyage. It was a curfew, not a lockdown, but I’m sure that it dampened demand for that destination.”

Mr D’Aguilar lamented that critical factors influencing the strength and pace of The Bahamas’ post-COVID recovery, namely “vaccine uptake and vaccine roll-out”, remained largely outside this nation’s control. But once this nation has secured an adequate vaccine supply, he added that it then needs to “have a conversation with individual Bahamians that this is the best thing for them”.

“As the health officials say, the people in the hospitals haven’t been vaccinated. Hopefully, that starts to percolate through to people,” Mr D’Aguilar said. “Unfortunately, the evidence which we have to lay out is that all the people in the hospital are the ones not vaccinated. This demonstrates that if you have been vaccinated and catch it, you will not get sick that you have to go to hospital.”

Asked whether the Government needs to mount a more aggressive education campaign to persuade and incentivise Bahamians to become fully vaccinated, he replied: “Clearly, clearly. If you are getting this level of hesitancy, the Government clearly has to work harder to convince Bahamians that this is the right thing for them.

“It would be easier if everybody bought into this, but we have to have this personal conversation with everyone to convince them this is the right thing. We’ve got to have this conversation. If people will not come to the vaccine, we will have to take the vaccine to the people. It’s not ideal, but we’ve been doing it to a certain degree in the Family Islands. 

“People say they will sign up to it, but we don’t have that much time. Let’s face it, COVID-19 is here for the rest of our lives. People have to learn to deal with it, to live with it, and the only way to protect yourself against fatal effects is to vaccinate. A lot of people say they want to wait and see how it works, but 1.2bn to 1.3bn already have it.”