Bureaucrats imagine that everything can be solved by a change in administration. We, the public, have bought into that idea, and when something does not work, we demand a change in administration. Sometimes, though, the problem is the system not the administrators 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. 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”. Yet year after year, administration after administration, the blight continues. To satisfy us, the bureaucrats simply hold up bigger tourism numbers.

To understand the numbers presented and the extent to which they may or may not represent success, here are a few important definitions. First, there is the definition of a customer. 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. Calling a cruise ship passenger your customer is disingenuous, at least. They are the customers of the cruise lines, and we are, at most, a tour. 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. The last numbers I heard were that the cruise passenger spends less than $100 a head while passing through our shop, while the stopover visitor (the destination’s customer) spends $1300. Thirteen to sixteen times as much. Clearly counting cruise passengers is deceptive, but itavoids the fact that the destination is largely without customers of its own.

The second definition is the definition of a resort versus a hotel. A resort is an attraction with its own accommodations. As a business it is selling an experience, and has accommodations for its customers. It is therefore its own destination. A hotel, on the other hand, sells accommodations, and gets its business from the destination’s success in attracting customers. If the destination is popular, hotels do well. If not, they die. 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. He would not have been the customer of Nassau as a destination, but of Atlantis, the resort. When we count the resort’s customer as the destination’s customer, we risk not noticing critical things about our own business. For example, almost every hotel on New Providence went out of business during the 1970’s (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.

So, now we can look at those tourism numbers with perhaps a more critical eye. In 2019, when we recorded over 7 million visitors, 5.5million were cruise visitors (well over three quarters), and at least 15% would have been the customers of the larger resorts in Nassau. Out of the 7 million visitors, then, less than a million were actually customers of the destination. 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.

The final definition is the requirements for a successful business. Regardless of the kind of business you run, there are three things you must have to succeed. You must have your own customers, product that is salable in the market and you must be making a profit. Without customers of our own, the rest is academic.A business depending on someone else’s customer cannot sustain itself.  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. 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. During all that time we were boasting of success and garnering awards.

To create an analogy, we have been refining the air conditioning in our car while the battery has had no cables. For the past four or five decades we have spent money advertising and promoting the Bahamas and supporting the marketing of resorts. The results have been abysmal, falling from the leading destination in the region to at least fourth. Our tourism product is in shambles, with practically no contact between visitors and our story. Even as a cruise destination we are the largest but the worst. What are we doing wrong and what should we be doing?

When someone tells us that tourism based on sun, sand and sea is no longer working, we quickly arrange a survey and “prove” that people love our beautiful sun, sand and sea, then continue the same promotion, undaunted. The fact is that, while it is true that people love sun, sand and sea, they can now get it in a million places, easier and at lower cost than in the Bahamas. Plus, there are travel devices (like the cruise) that offer it as a bi-product of their service. While offering it as an amenity, it is time to acknowledge that the Bahamas needs a new tourism customer-getting strategy. Or more correctly, to re-implement the strategy that made the country successful in the first place.

There are three customer-getting devices in use globally. Destinations choose one or a combination of three devices as a branding mechanism and commit to it long-term. Tourist destinations are known for either events, activities or the existence of Special Places. For example, New Orleans is known for its commitment to events. The Dominican Republic is known for the activity of golf. Niagara Falls is a special place. Sixty years ago, we had a commitment to a combination of events and special places. Our environment offered special places galore, and we developed events like Speed Week, the Miami-Nassau Powerboat Race, Miami-Nassau Sailboat Race, celebrity sports events (Muhammed Ali’s final fight), Bimini billfish tournaments and a host of others. The result was what us old folk brag about – tourism all over the country making lots of money and increased wealth for Bahamians. Today, not only is there precious little intended to create destination customers, those of us with an intention to create such devices do so with the least assistance from government, as if they are subverting some carefully guarded secret agenda.

This, of course, is a national concern, not just a Nassau problem. Freeport lost its customer-getting system when their casino lost its exclusivity as casinos appeared in Florida and the rest of the Bahamas, as Disney’s success made the idea behind the International Bazaar,  themed shopping, common in the US, and when they gave up golf as a destination activity. Like Nassau, its economy will not improve until it creates a new customer-getting strategy.

Next, there is product. The loss of customers of our own meant the death of the attractions that depended on those customers. Nightclubs, restaurants, art galleries, museums, even the heritage attractions, all suffered and, in many cases died. Without support they have not been reborn. That is why the destination ratees so badly today. A focus on strategies for the development of attractions is not just a personal goal, but critical to the success of the destination. First, government must be as generous with incentives for the production of viable attractions as it has been with paying resorts and airlines to bring visitors who can’t find anything to spend their money on. This is not a favour to entertainers and attraction operators. It is necessary for the destination’s survival. The business cannot make money without product to sell. There should have been a division of the Ministry of Tourism tasked with the development of product years ago. Sadly, the division that promised to do so has not yet engaged with the attractions industry.

Finally, there is the need to change the attitude that separates tourists from locals. Yes, there is a need for us to have a look at how we behave (mostly towards one another), but we must understand that what we are selling in the business of tourism is the one thing nobody else in the world can offer – our story. Product is created from our unique place, our unique history, our unique  belief systems and our lifestyle. It is both business and psychological suicide to try to pretend we don’t exist as part of our own story. We are who we are. If we don’t like how that shows up we might choose to change some things. But we cannot continue to leave ourselves out of our own story and hope to improve our tourism business. For maximum success, we must tell our story in our built environment, in art, craft, theater, literature, music and dance with pride, and know that that is what our customers came prepared to spend their money for.

Customers of our own, product telling the story of our place, our history, our beliefs and our unique way of life and the knowledge that our story is value for anybody’s money. That is what we need. To get it we must commit to a more effective customer-getting strategy, to major investment in the telling of our story and to really believing in the value of our own story.