By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

A Harbour Island resort is reconsidering an $850,000 marina expansion due to boating industry push back over the new and increased fees introduced with the 2025-2026 Budget.

Valentine’s Resort and Marina, the largest in Briland with 51 slips, was planning to start the project at the end of July or early August. However, its managing director, Lee Prosenjak said he is not sure the improvements can be justified if there are fewer boating visitors.

“We’ve got a project that’s going up that starts at the end of July or early August for $850,000 worth of improvements to the marina,” Mr Prosenjak said. “And now I got to sit here and factor do all those matter any more? Do I still need them? If I’m going to have less boats, it’s a lot harder to justify spending that money. Which is a lot of Bahamian labour that could come in and Bahamian contractors.”

Mr Prosenjak said the “trickle down” effect from not proceeding would take a toll on surrounding businesses. “So we have 35 rooms at the resort, and we’ve got 51 dock slips plus the restaurant, of course, and associated businesses,” Mr Prosenjak said.

“We have Valentine’s Dive, which is not ours. It’s a tenant of ours’ space. We’ve got the Cocoa Coffee shop, the Dermalogica spa. If we have less people on the island, everybody’s feeling a huge difference in how many feet on the street there is.

“It’s definitely an opportunity cost. It’s a trickle down thing in terms of, if we have 10 less boats in the marina over July 4, well, that means there’s, on average, probably six people that come on a boat. That’s 60 less people to go to dinner at all of the different restaurants, The Landing, the Ocean View Club. They all have 60 less guests to choose from to get reservations. And that’s just at us.

“Factor that by how many other marinas there are across Harbour Island. It’s 60 less people to buy t-shirts in every gift shop. It’s 60 less people that are going to go to the grocery store even to provision their boats,” Mr Prosenjak continued.

“It’s 60 less people that are going to take advantage of everything, go to lunch at Coral Sands and be at the beach bar, Mrs V’s down on the beach itself. Like that’s a lot of 60 less people, and that’s just on a daily basis. So having 60 less people on the island is a big deal when there’s 1,700 people normally.”

Mr Prosenjak is offering incentives to guests to keep them coming back, including issuing refunds and credit towards future trips. “I had a 130-foot boat that said, ‘Hey, we want a refund,’” Mr Prosenjak added. “They’re leaving early. In the past, I would have said, ‘Oh, sorry. You committed to nights and you only wanted seven now.’

“But I’m like, ‘I can’t risk this customer saying ‘I’m never coming back there again’. So I’m like, ‘Okay, we’ll give you a refund on two nights’, which we normally don’t ever do. But I’m like, ‘I can’t afford to upset this customer right now’.

“We try to be pretty liberal with our policy normally. So if you cancel within 14 days of arrival, then we put the deposit that you paid towards a future stay credit. So we’re trying to keep people still coming. And a lot of times in the boating industry, if it’s bad weather or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oh, hey, I can’t make it today. I’ll be there tomorrow. We’re still going to stay four days.’” he said.

“Or they might say, ‘We’ll cut it down to three days, but we’ll still be there.’ And so we just say, okay, because we’ll take it in that case. It’s not a hard, fast science sort of thing. So now at holidays we don’t give them the future stay credit.

“So I’ve been very generous. That’s the normal thing, but I’ve been very generous this year to say, ‘Hey, are you coming back? Let’s put it towards a future state credit for you’, just to make sure that we keep them coming back and thinking that they want to come back.”

Valentine’s Resort and Marina may have to charge off-season prices, which is $400 a night and begins usually in mid-August, in late July instead to accommodate any losses. Mr Prosenjak said the lower price may earn him more guests “but that’s less VAT that comes in with that because 10 percent of $400 is less than 10 percent of $600”.

“I think that we’re in a state where we’ve over-taxed everything,” Mr Prosenjak added. “And, yeah, we can talk to the Association of Bahamas Marinas, but at the end of the day, you got to figure out what’s the right price point, and what’s the right fee and look at it from a holistic nature. Two-and-a-half years ago, going up on the VAT on charter boats, I understand it.

“We saw that it was a drastic reduction in charter boats, and so you can call that a direct correlation to cause and effect because boats just weren’t coming here. They kept going and kept going by, and went to other destinations. Like they went down to BVI. They went down to Anguilla. You can see the boats going that way. And same thing with St Barts. We’re now the highest price entry fee anywhere in the Caribbean. We’re on line with places like Monaco.

“So if that’s our target customer, and that’s all we’re going to attract, well, everybody has to reset their earning potential to how many of those boats are there in the world that are going to come here and how are we going to make that happen?” Mr Prosenjak added.

“We’ve got to double down on investments. We can’t have staff for all this if not everybody’s going to be here. So it’s a huge amount of people that are impacted by this since 80 percent of our GDP is tourism. To say that we’re going to just raise essentially, taxes on that unilaterally, and cut out a whole bottom section of our market...

“I think the hotels themselves have been in a place where we’ve out-priced our market. To start at $600 a night is a big ask. That means that every tourist that comes here, you got to look at them as someone that’s earning in the US, potentially, to come here with flights or a boat and then to stay on the islands at, you know, $600 a night...

“You can’t touch a room in Atlantis for less than $500, or same thing with Baha Mar. Even the holiday in there is $350 a night. I mean, that’s someone that has at least $150,000 if not $200,000 of earnings every year in the US. And those jobs just don’t exist right now.”