By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Chief Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net 

FREE National Movement leader Michael Pintard said the government’s refusal to recognise that stopover arrivals to The Bahamas are decreasing is doing more harm than good to the economy.

He insisted that stopover visitors to the country are becoming cruise passengers, with devastating economic implications.

“The numbers clearly show that as cruise passenger numbers rise and we giddily celebrate record-breaking arrivals, our stopovers fall,” Mr Pintard said in a statement yesterday.

“Using data presented at the Ministry of Tourism’s July 5th press conference, for every 6 percent conversion — representing a loss of 100,000 stopovers — our economy loses $250m or a quarter of a billion in visitor spending.” 

He said The Bahamas is the last in the region for stopover visitor growth and cruise passengers contributed to the record-setting increase in visitor arrivals in 2023.

“Those in denial do not wish to acknowledge that the growth of cruise visitors and the fall off stopovers are interrelated,” he said. “They do not wish to recognise that the biggest threat to our tourism economy is the continued conversion of stopovers to cruise passengers. Doing so would force them to acknowledge that they have been celebrating economic suicide. 

“Instead, they attribute the lack of growth of stopovers to the loss of hotel rooms between 2019 and today, even though, unlike the cruise lines, our current hotel rooms are far from 100 percent occupancy.”

He said the Davis administration is “at pains” to explain why The Bahamas is losing hotel rooms while other countries have thousands under construction.

“Could it be,” he said, “that other destinations are growing their much more economically valuable land-based tourism while The Bahamas continues to celebrate lower-spending cruise visitors? Could it be that investors are betting their capital on businesses that are growing, not on those that are faltering?”

He said both land-based and cruise-based tourism could co-exist profitably but added that the Bahamian economy could not improve when those in government are in denial.

“We once took pride in being regarded as the tourism leaders in our region,” he said. “We understand that tourism delivers ‘roughly 60 percent  of our GDP — most of that, approximately 87 percent is delivered by stopover visitors. For the sake of the Bahamian economy, there is no better time than now to show that leadership again.”

Tourism Minister Chester Cooper has previously accused Mr Pintard of making “inaccurate and irresponsible” statements concerning tourism numbers.

“Pintard appears to want to paint increasing cruise ship arrivals as a bad thing, which is one of the most absurd statements I have ever heard,” he said last month.