For the past four or five decades we have spent money advertising and promoting The Bahamas and supporting the marketing of resorts. To create an analogy, we have been refining the air conditioning in our car while the battery has had no cables. During all that time we were boasting of success and garnering awards. In the time our stopover numbers went from 1.4 million in 1991 to 1.6 million in 2018, the Dominican Republic’s went from about 786,000 to 6.4 million. Yet successive governments have committed to a formula in which they support those whose tourism businesses are simply located in The Bahamas in the hope of getting some residual return (primarily employment), while ignoring changes in our own tourism business. A business depending on someone else’s customer cannot sustain itself. Without customers of our own, the rest is academic. You must have your own customers, product that is saleable in the market and you must be making a profit. Regardless of the kind of business you run, there are three things you must have to succeed. The final definition is the requirements for a successful business. We appear not to measure that number, since even the government does not acknowledge the difference between a resort and a hotel, between its customers and those of the resorts. Out of the seven million visitors, then, less than a million were actually customers of the destination. In 2019, when we recorded over seven million visitors, 5.5 million were cruise visitors (well over three quarters), and at least 15 percent would have been the customers of the larger resorts in Nassau. So, now we can look at those tourism numbers with perhaps a more critical eye. For example, almost every hotel on New Providence went out of business during the 1970s (Montague, Prince George, Carleton, Windsor, Mayfair, Drake), and we paid no attention because of the success of the Cable Beach and Paradise Island resorts, whose customers we assumed were ours. When we count the resort’s customer as the destination’s customer, we risk not noticing critical things about our own business. He would not have been the customer of Nassau as a destination, but of Atlantis, the resort. A visitor who has booked a week at a resort like Atlantis may spend his entire week at the resort and leave without ever visiting New Providence, fully satisfied with his purchase. If the destination is popular, hotels do well. A hotel, on the other hand, sells accommodations, and gets its business from the destination’s success in attracting customers. As a business it is selling an experience, and has accommodations for its customers. A resort is an attraction with its own accommodations. The second definition is the definition of a resort versus a hotel. Clearly counting cruise passengers is deceptive, but it avoids the fact that the destination is largely without customers of its own. Roughly, the last numbers I heard were that the cruise passenger spends less than $100 a head, while the stopover visitor (the destination’s customer) spends $1300. The destination’s customer is someone who buys the destination’s attractions, lives in the destination’s accommodations, uses the destination’s hospitality, is transported by the destination’s taxis and engages with the destination’s vendors generally. They are the customers of the cruise lines, and we are, at most, a tour. Calling a cruise ship passenger your customer is disingenuous, at least. A customer is not someone who merely passes through your shop or business, but someone who does business with you, who purchases the product you are offering. First, there is the definition of a customer. To understand the numbers presented and the extent to which they may or may not represent success, here are a few important definitions. To satisfy us, the bureaucrats simply hold up bigger tourism numbers. Yet year after year, administration after administration, the blight continues. We complain, for example, that on New Providence there is no apparent benefit from tourism over most of the island, and each new administration promises to find ways to bring economic benefit “over the hill”. For example, we believe that a new administration, headed by a new government, will solve the problem of the limited benefits from our national business, tourism. Sometimes, though, the problem is the system, not the administrators. We, the public, have bought into that idea, and when something does not work, we demand a change in administration. Bureaucrats imagine that everything can be solved by a change in administration.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |