By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas now needs to attract 28 cruise visitors to match the spending of one land-based or stopover visitor, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) revealed yesterday.

The multilateral lender, in its first regional “quarterly bulletin” of 2021, highlighted that The Bahamas’ increased dependence pre-COVID-19 for cruise visitors to drive the majority of arrivals growth was not being matched by a spending increase of similar proportions.

However, it suggested that the imminent start of home porting in The Bahamas by Royal Caribbean and Crystal Cruises, with potentially Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) to follow, could help boost cruise passenger spending yields.

“Cruise visitors continued to represent three-fourths of arrivals to the country,” the IDB said of the pre-pandemic tourism environment. “However, based on data on the average expenditure per tourist, it now takes 28 cruise visitors to equal the spending of one stopover visitor.

“Home porting of cruise lines could help significantly in increasing the amount that cruise visitors spend in the country, as many would spend (at least) a night in a hotel before embarking and upon disembarking. This could boost spending on hospitality, food services, and other items per cruise ship passenger, and it could also increase the overall flow of cruise ship passengers.”

The cruise industry will have been absent from The Bahamas for almost 15 months by the time Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas begins sailing from Nassau on June 12. The IDB report, meanwhile, added that The Bahamas’ dependence on US travellers could see its tourism industry rebound faster than Caribbean rivals despite suffering the greatest COVID-related decline of all major regional destinations.

It argued that The Bahamas’ proximity to the market that supplies 81 percent of its visitors could give it an advantage over Caribbean rivals during the early stages of post-pandemic rebound.

“Moving forward, one of the positives is that the US is accelerating its vaccination programme, which should give potential travellers more confidence to travel,” the IDB said. “Vaccinated people may still exhibit a ‘home bias’ in making their travel plans and choose domestic destinations, but, that said, the geographic proximity of The Bahamas may give it an advantage over other more distant international destinations.”

The multilateral lender said there were also opportunities to boost domestic tourism, adding: “In addition, even though domestic tourism only averaged 19 percent of total tourism expenditure within the country (between 2015 and 2019), the archipelago contains many natural wonders that could serve for an expansion of the domestic segment during a recovery phase.

“Many analysts believe that business travel will recover more slowly than leisure travel, but in The Bahamas business travel accounts for only 11 percent of total tourism expenditure, half the global average.” Hotels, though, rely heavily on group business to drive and organise bookings, with leisure travellers scheduled around them.

However, noting that the Bahamian economy’s output contracted by 16.3 percent in 2020 due to COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions and the curtailment of tourism, the IDB said this nation suffered the largest decline of all major Caribbean destinations.

“Overall, 2020 represented a contraction of international visitor arrivals of 76 percent for The Bahamas, 67 percent for Barbados and 69 percent for Jamaica,” the report added. While The Bahamas attracted visitor arrivals comparable to 84.6 percent of 2019 levels during the 2020 first quarter, which was only hit by COVID in the latter two weeks, tourism fell to zero in the subsequent three months.

Tourist arrivals for the 2020 third and fourth quarters were equivalent to just 2.1 percent and 1.2 percent of prior year figures, as The Bahamas fought a second infection wave, thus dropping 2020 arrivals below those received by Barbados and Jamaica in percentage terms compared to pre-pandemic.

“The speed of the recovery will depend upon whether travellers from traditional source markets will prefer domestic tourism over international tourism,” the IDB said. “Traveller preferences have shifted toward the familiar, predictable, and most trusted - in the pandemic context, it turns out that there is no place like home (or near home).....

“Globally, domestic tourism is expected to reach pre-pandemic 2019 levels by mid-2022, while international tourism is not expected to recover until the second half of 2024. Even more importantly, by 2024 domestic tourism is expected to be around 25 to 30 percent higher than 2019 levels in some markets.

“This trend is an opportunity for many countries, but it could indeed have a dampening effect for Caribbean destinations going forward, as domestic tourism looms large in the key source markets for the Caribbean.”