Visitors to The Bahamas who are very likely to recommend the destination to others are reporting greater visitor satisfaction in 2010 compared to five years earlier.
The information, released by the Ministry of Tourism on Tuesday, was based on data gathered from exit surveys. Among potential recommenders, hotel staff attitudes garnered the most favorable responses; up to 45.8 percent, 2.5 percent above 2005 levels. The greatest increase in satisfaction levels came in the hotel room category, that area up about 5 percent from 24.9 percent in 2005 to 29.8 percent in 2010.
But the report lacked what may be a critical bit of information needed to understand the whole picture of satisfaction levels. It did not report on the actual increase or decrease in the percentage of stopovers who would recommend this destination to others.
Stopover visitor arrivals have been falling every year from 2005 to 2009, according to data available on the ministry’s Tourism Today website. Respective stopover numbers for years 2005 to 2009 were 1,608,153; 1,600,862; 1,527,727; 1,463,006; and 1,327,006. Official stopover figures for 2010 have not been released, but after nine months were up about 5 percent over 2009, coming in at 1,091,012 visitors. The number of stopover guests for 2009 was around 17.5 percent below the 2005 number.
While the deep and long recession of the last few years would have been to blame for much of the fall-off seen in the last few years of the period, the worrisome trend brings to the fore the question of whether, overall, more guests or a greater percentage of them are likely to recommend the destination now. Guardian Business was not able to secure a response from the Ministry of Tourism on the change in that area specifically.
However, the results are still generally encouraging, showing difficult-to-manage but critical aspects of the guest experience improving. Examples of these include perceptions of personal safety, ‘attitudes’ guests encountered away from hotels, and perceptions about cleanliness. The Minister of Tourism and Aviation, Sen. Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace says the increasing satisfaction levels are the fruit of the efforts made in these areas.
“This is clear evidence that training efforts in both the private and public sectors have had an effect, that the collaboration with the Police has had an effect and that the massive increase in expenditure in cleaning up and fixing the streets have had an effect. In fact the last point has had the second highest percentage improvement,” said Vanderpool-Wallace.
Of the ten categories the statisticians examine to understand the stopover guest experience, only the taxi category was down. That area showed a small drop-off of around a half percent, falling from 29.3 percent to 28.8 percent across the period.
Vanderpool-Wallace told the Nassau Guardian in February that the ministry planned to begin releasing the results of exit surveys to the general public, adding that the measure should go a long way in helping Bahamians collectively understand and address some of the issues that are being raised by visitors. He also said that while both the good and bad would be released, disclosures would not include information that would be detrimental to the destination from a competitive perspective. The form the reports would take and release dates had not yet been determined at that time.
The satisfaction levels reported were based on the difference between the percentage of stopovers reporting ‘much better than expected’ experiences and those reporting ‘not as good’ or ‘much worse’ in the ten categories.
“We have invested a great deal of effort and resources in perfecting methods and systems that enable us to learn what matters in visitor satisfaction and what affects the visitor’s intent to recommend The Bahamas to friends and relatives,” Vanderpool-Wallace said.
“‘It’s Better in The Bahamas’ must spring from the visitor experience and this suggests that the claim is true at least relative to the past five years.”
