By FAY SIMMONS

TRIBUNE BUSINESS REPORTER

jsimmons@tribunemedia.net

TRADE Commission Chairman Barry Griffin said The Bahamas needs to move beyond simply urging hotels to “buy local” and instead build Bahamian companies capable of meeting the tourism industry’s demands for price, quality, volume and reliability.

Mr Griffin made the case for a more deliberate link between tourism and trade during the SIDS Global Business Network Forum 2026 and Island Investment Forum in Malé, Maldives, where he argued that the country’s tourism industry should be used as an anchor market for developing local businesses and eventually creating new exporters.

He said greater local participation in tourism supply chains cannot be achieved simply by asking hotels and other major tourism businesses to purchase more Bahamian products.

For local companies to successfully compete for major procurement opportunities, they must be able to meet the requirements of sophisticated tourism operators, including price, quality, volume, certification, consistency and reliability.

Mr Griffin proposed that policymakers first develop a clearer understanding of what the tourism industry is actually importing and identify goods and services that could realistically and competitively be supplied by Bahamian businesses.

Where hotels or other large tourism businesses indicate that they would purchase a product locally but existing companies cannot meet the necessary volume, standards or reliability, he said that unmet demand should be treated as a business-development opportunity.

Government, development banks, chambers of commerce, trade agencies and the tourism industry could then work backwards from proven market demand to help businesses develop the capacity required to capture those opportunities.

That would represent a shift from the traditional approach of developing businesses and subsequently asking them to find markets, Mr Griffin said.

Instead, policymakers could identify existing demand and deliberately help domestic businesses close gaps in financing, production, certification, technology, quality and scale.

Access to financing would be particularly important, he said, noting that a small farmer, manufacturer or other SME could secure an opportunity with a major hotel but still lack the equipment, production capacity or working capital needed to fulfil a large contract.

Greater integration between procurement opportunities, business development and financing would therefore be needed if local companies are to enter and remain in major tourism supply chains.

Mr Griffin said the objective should also extend beyond replacing imports, with tourism procurement serving as a training ground for companies seeking to eventually enter international markets.

“The hotel can become the incubator for the exporter,” he said.

A Bahamian company capable of supplying hundreds of rooms at a major international hotel would develop expertise in production, packaging, quality control, consistency, logistics and international hospitality standards, he argued.

That experience could then position the company to pursue contracts with the same hospitality group in overseas markets.

“Imagine a Bahamian company first learning to supply 500 hotel rooms in Nassau. It develops the standards, packaging, production capacity and reliability necessary to serve an international hospitality brand. Why shouldn't that same company eventually supply that hotel group in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe or elsewhere?”

“Then tourism has done something much more powerful than simply creating a local sale. It has helped create an exporter.”

Mr Griffin’s comments form part of his proposed “tourism-to-trade” approach, which would seek to use the millions of international visitors coming to The Bahamas as a source of demand for Bahamian businesses.

He argued that tourism presents an unusual export opportunity because the international customer comes directly into the country.

“For many Small Island Developing States, tourism is our largest export industry. But there is something unusual about this particular export: the customer comes to us,” Mr Griffin said.

He said much of what is required to service tourism demand — from food and furniture to hotel amenities, technology and consumer products — is often imported.

“We earn the foreign exchange, and then we use a significant portion of that foreign exchange to purchase the imports required to service the very industry that generated it. That is the leakage problem,” he said.

Mr Griffin said the next stage of economic development should therefore involve building more of the domestic economy around demand already generated by tourism.

Under his proposed approach, a Bahamian farmer supplying produce to a resort, a manufacturer supplying hotel amenities or a technology company providing solutions to an international resort would all be participating in an international tourism value chain.

He said the policy question should no longer simply be how to persuade hotels to purchase more locally.

“We should be asking: what would it take to build Bahamian companies capable of supplying a world-class tourism industry consistently, competitively and at scale?”

Mr Griffin said the strategy would form part of the Trade Commission’s broader work on the National Export Strategy, trade diversification and improvements to trade and logistics infrastructure.

He also argued that the approach could help address the limitations created by The Bahamas’ relatively small domestic market.

“Our challenge is not necessarily that we lack demand. In many of our countries, the world is already coming to us,” said Mr Griffin.

“Our challenge is converting more of that international demand into domestic production, domestic ownership, domestic entrepreneurship and, eventually, exports.”

He said the success of tourism should also increasingly be measured by how deeply visitor spending penetrates the domestic economy, rather than only by arrivals and total visitor expenditure.

“How much of every tourism dollar remained in the country? How many domestic businesses entered the tourism supply chain? How many of those businesses grew because of it? And ultimately, how many of them became exporters themselves?” he asked.

Mr Griffin said the ultimate objective for The Bahamas and other Small Island Developing States should be not only to attract more money through tourism, but to develop economies capable of retaining more of that spending and converting it into locally owned businesses capable of competing internationally.