By YOURI KEMP
Tribune Business Reporter
ykemp@tribunemedia.net
The Deputy Prime Minister yesterday forecast that 2023 tourist arrivals will hit the eight million mark with downtown Nassau’s British Colonial Hilton set to fully re-open by year-end.
Chester Cooper, also minister for tourism, aviation and investments, predicted ahead of the weekly Cabinet meeting that “stopover visitors will be at least 20 percent ahead” of 2022’s seven million, seven hundred and six visitors as last year’s momentum carries over into the next 11 months.
Last year’s arrivals numbers fell just short of the 7.2m pre-COVID record set in 2019. “We are up in every metric. However you measure it, we’ve had a banner year in terms of occupancy, in terms of average daily rates, in terms of overall tourism spend, in terms of arrivals, in terms of new airlift seating capacity, so all measurements are up,” Mr Cooper said.
“We’ve had a phenomenal year. We’re excited about it. But what’s better is that 2023 is already looking very strong, and we’re going to have a better year in 2023 than we did in 2022. All of the forward bookings suggest that, and all of our intelligence in the market suggests that our brand is very strong. People are talking about our country and wanting to come and experience the various islands in the Bahamas.
“We’re going to ten cities this year with our [promotional] missions,” he added. “We’re continuing them and, over the course of the next several months, you’ll hear more about this. But these are going to happen between March and November.
“So we are continuing the things that worked in 2022. Were adding to those things that worked in 2022, and we anticipate that overall stopover visitors will be at least 20 percent ahead. We anticipate that we’re going to hit the eight million tourism arrival mark in 2023.”
To help accommodate the anticipated surge in tourism arrivals, Mr Cooper said he expects the British Colonial will undergo a phased re-opening beginning this summer. He added that he is awaiting an update from the resort’s owner, China Construction America (CCA), on their intentions and plans.
“We are anticipating that parts of the hotel will be open during the summer months based on the most recent information received from the owners of the resort, and they are pushing to have the hotel fully opened by the end of the year - by the winter season,” he said.
Returning to the 2022 tourism statistics, Mr Cooper added: “It was a phenomenal year in terms of our overall arrivals. More than seven million, and the only time we’ve done this before was in 2019, which was a record-setting year. This is significant for tourism, it’s significant for the economy, significant for the people of The Bahamas.
“We don’t celebrate numbers for the celebration of numbers themselves. But we believe tourism is really the catalyst for national development. It is really the driver for Bahamian empowerment. This is how Bahamians continue to be well-off. This is how we will continue to create businesses.
“We’ve been talking about linkages with tourism now for decades. The Tourism Development Corporation now will do something about it. Seven million [visitors] is really a marketplace for the expansion of the economy, and for the empowerment of Bahamians, and that’s how we hope to look at it.”
Many of 2022’s visitors were “first time” arrivals, and multiple Family Islands are seeing increased numbers except for Abaco, which is still “trailing slightly around 80 percent of pre-Dorian and pre pandemic levels”.
John Rolle, the Central Bank’s governor, in his 2022 year-end and fourth quarter economic briefing on Monday, said that while tourism’s full recovery from COVID’s ravages is “incomplete” it is “considerably advanced”. He added that November’s stopover, or air, arrivals exceeded the pre-pandemic record of the same month in 2018, which the Central Bank is using for comparative purposes because it excludes Hurricane Dorian’s impact.
“In the overall trends, the gains from recovered stopover volumes were amplified by rising average nightly room rates for both resort properties and vacation rental units,” Mr Rolle said. “In the stopover segment, by November, the seasonal rebound in air arrivals had broken even the pre-pandemic high for the same month, which is a comparison against November 2018 that also preceded Hurricane Dorian.
“On a monthly basis, the cruise sector’s seasonal rebound had already significantly eclipsed the pre-pandemic base. However, both cruise and stopover visitors still have calendar year shortfalls to recoup. For the 11 months through November, total air arrivals had converged to just 82 percent of the pre-pandemic high, and sea arrivals were at about 95 percent of the same comparisons.
“This remaining calendar year performance gap in both markets underscores the further healthy boost in the annual visitor volumes that is expected to occur during 2023.... The Bahamas is still in recovery mode, benefiting from significant pent-up demand for travel and capacity that is still being restored in the airline and hotel sectors. This will allow the economy to experience above average growth again in 2023.”
Mr Rolle said the various “headwinds”, or downside risks for The Bahamas, which he identified as inflation, COVID-19, global energy (oil) costs, the war in Ukraine and rising global interest rates, were “not likely to contract the economy in the near-term”.