Tourism As A Business

 

Mr. Rahming stated that the three things needed to have a successful business were your own customers, marketable products for sale and profits. He advised that without any of these three things, the business will fail.

 

Mr. Rahming said that we do not have customers of our own and compared the Bahamas to other countries in the region where tourists have visited over the last 30 years.  In his presentation he gave information about the Bahamas leading the region in stopover visitors in 1991 with 1.42 million stopover visitors, Cuba reported 450,000 that year, The Dominican Republic had 786,000 and Jamaica had 1 million stopover visitors.  In 2018 the Bahamas had not yet reached 1.7 million stopover visitors, but Cuba had had 3.7 million stopovers, Jamaica had 2.3 million and the Dominican Republic had 6.4 million stopover visitors that year.  There were customers in the region, but the majority of them were not coming to the Bahamas.

 

In the 1970s, numerous businesses offering just accommodations went out of business and what survived were resorts which were beach attractions offering their own accommodations.  Others in the region have increased their customer base eight hundred percent while we have only seen a twenty percent increase.

 

Mr. Rahming said that we need more products for sale and we can offer more unique experiences such as showcasing settlements, unique natural events or geographic phenomena such as the glass window bridge, showcasing historic attractions, mythological and belief related attractions and lifestyle attractions such as theaters, museums, art galleries, night clubs, local restaurants and festivals.  Mr. Rahming is of the opinion that we had more product to offer in the 1960s than we do now and much of the product offerings suffered from the loss of our customer base in the 1970s and there is not enough product to support a successful tourism business.

 

Without the hotels and their stopover customers local attractions died.  Some of the attractions that Mr. Rahming highlighted that died were museums like the Bahamian Museum and Jumbey Village Museum, art galleries like Brent Malone's gallery, attractions like The Nassau Seafloor Aquarium, the sound and light show at Fort Charlotte, Blackbeard's Tower and night clubs such as the Drum Beat Club and The King and Knight's Club who had to change their business model.

 

Without products to sell and customers to buy there was no profits from our tourism business. According to Mr. Rahming, the good news is that the problem is fixable if we return to the business model for a true tourist destination, operating a tourism business that has a customer creation system, decent products for sale and profits that remain in the local economy.  A successful return to our "family business" would require doing what other successful destinations do by focusing on getting their own customers, providing lots of products and keeping the profits in their local economy.  Mr. Rahming said to get customers you need a game worth watching and compared the process of getting customers to a football game for a small ticket price.  Once you get the customers into the game, the real money is made from the concessions.

 

We have to get the customers by using a destination attraction and then use the local attractions to get them to spend money.  Mr. Rahming spoke about other tourism destinations around the world to show that an attraction does not have to have beaches to get many customers.  He stated that there are three types of attractions in use globally; events, activities and special places.  True tourist destinations choose between these three devices as the primary customer creation system.  He gave the example of Atlanta hosting the Superbowl in 2019 (an event) to get 1 million customers into their city for a week or more.  He reiterated that to succeed in any business you need customers of your own, viable products and profits.