By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

The digital payment provider responsible for processing health travel visa fees yesterday said it was merely obeying government policy as it felt such charges should not be levied.

Nicholas Rees, Kanoo’s chairman, told Tribune Business: “My position was always that Bahamians should not be charged for the travel visa. But we’re a service provider and we have nothing to do with government policy.”

He was responding to deputy prime minister, Chester Cooper, who confirmed that health travel visa fees would be waived for all Bahamians and residents returning to the country, as well as those engaged in inter-island travel around the country. International travellers are the only category that will still pay a fee.

Mr Rees added: “I think the comments from the current minister of tourism (Chester Cooper) on the position seem to be extremely sober, logical, intelligent and have a lot of foresight.

“I think they’ve come in and realised the value of the platform and the system.” He added that Kanoo does not provide the health travel visa platform but is just the “facilitator for processing the payments”.

Kanoo partnered with technology firm, Think Simple, which created a platform that generates stopover visitor data from which Kanoo uses to process the payments for the travel health visa. Mr Cooper, and his predecessor as minister of tourism, Dionisio D’Aguilar, views that data as “critical” in gathering information on international travellers.

Mr Rees said: “The data is invaluable. The Government of the day now has the ability to market to existing clientele or customers for repeat visits, for surveys and that’s a tremendous opportunity for us as a country to have that kind of data.”

“I salute the current government for its position and stance, and we look forward to assisting in any way we can. We have no access to the data; we just process payments. We receive instructions to collect $40, we charge it and that’s that.”

The health travel visa, implemented in May 2020, was seized upon by the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) as a major general election campaign issue given that paying a fee to return to their country was unpopular with many Bahamians.

There were claims that the Minnis administration and Kanoo stood to make millions of dollars from charging Bahamians and international travellers for the visa, and that the funds were not being deposited into the Government’s Consolidated Fund.

These allegations were subsequently rebutted by the Ministry of Tourism, and the Government’s 2021-2022 Budget essentially showed the health travel visa was a ‘break even’ proposition with revenues almost exactly equal to costs. This meant that the fees were merely designed to cover the expenses associated with operating the health travel visa.