By RASHAD ROLLE 

Tribune News Editor 

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

THE Nassau Airport Development Company said the Lynden Pindling International Airport (LPIA) welcomed a record 4.06 million passengers in fiscal year 2024, a milestone in the airport’s recovery from the pandemic.

This news comes amid concerns about the country’s ability to increase its share of stopover visitors. Free National Movement leader Michael Pintard has repeatedly criticised the country’s performance, saying The Bahamas lags behind the region in the growth of stopover visitors.

The previous record of 3.99 million passengers was set in 2019, and LPIA is on track to surpass its all-time calendar year record of 4.1 million passengers by December 2024.

According to a press release from NAD, the airport saw a 9.27 per cent increase in passenger traffic compared to the previous year, with growth across all sectors: US, international, and domestic. The bulk of the passengers — over 2.8 million — came from the US, while nearly 450,000 were international travellers and around 747,000 were domestic passengers.

The rise continues a recovery trend that began in 2022 when LPIA recorded 2.8 million passengers, followed by 3.7 million in 2023.

Vernice Walkine, president and CEO of NAD, credited the airport’s success to various factors, including new flight services, increased seat availability on existing routes, and the expansion of seasonal flights.

Ms Walkine noted that airlines have responded to strong demand for Nassau/Paradise Island by increasing seat capacity, which reached 6.379 million in FY2024, an 18 percent jump from the previous year and 11 per cent above 2019 levels.

Nonetheless, Robert Sands, the Bahamas Hotel and Tourism Association’s (BHTA) president told Tribune Business last week that much work is needed this year because the industry is not seeing the growth it did during the same period last year. He said the drop-off in group visitor business compared to an unusually strong 2023 third quarter likely played “a pivotal role” in this year’s softening.

Meanwhile, Julian Francis, Commonwealth Brewery’s chairman, told shareholders in the company’s 2023 annual report that “as a percentage of total arrivals, stopover visitors to The Bahamas have declined in relation to cruise visitors –– from an average of 25 per cent per annum over the 2015-2019 period to an

average of 21 per cent per annum between 2022 and 2023.”

“This shift,” he said, “points to a likely decline in the marginal spending benefit to the economy of the increases in arrival numbers since 2022.”

This was echoed by Daphne DeGregory-Miaoulis, the Abaco Chamber of Commerce president, who told Tribune Business: “Tourism numbers are up, but when you add up all the cruise ship bodies who don’t spend too much of anything, but we are bragging about the number of heads coming into the country.

“We need to be looking at more long-term stays, three to five-day stays, not coming off the cruise ships, walking around town and maybe buying a snack and t-shirt before going back on the cruise ship and going to their private islands where they don’t buy the t-shirt; they buy from the same people that brought them there.”