The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamian aviation industry was yesterday said to have been thrown “a curve ball” by the government’s tightening of COVID restrictions having regained just 40-50 percent of pre-pandemic business.

Anthony K Hamilton, Southern Air’s director of administration, and president of the Bahamas Association of Air Transport Operators, told Tribune Business that the industry will have “to roll with the punches” after the government reintroduced the PCR test requirement for all non-vaccinated travellers leaving New Providence, Grand Bahama and Eleuthera/Harbour Island.

He said the measures, brought in to counter the latest spike in COVID-19 cases that is threatening to overwhelm the public health system, will “certainly have an impact” on domestic aviation operators and the wider industry through “minimising to some degree the traffic potential”.

The reintroduction of the COVID-19 PCR test requirement will raise travel costs, and the associated bureaucracy and red tape, for non-vaccinated passengers and may discourage them from travelling. Tribune Business yesterday received a video, said to have been filmed in Exuma at 10.35am yesterday, of around 30-40 persons sitting on a hillside in Exuma waiting to receive a COVID test so they can travel.

A woman’s voice on the film said there was only one person there to administer the tests at a location that had opened at 10am. They described the queue and wait as “totally unacceptable and ridiculous”, and added: “There’s got to be a better way..... This is straight up ridiculous. Please, somebody, figure out how to make it better. It doesn’t have to be this bad.

“We have people saying how much they regret having to go through this, and was the experience worth it to go through this. This is something people should look at at the top. Can somebody figure this out? This is not a good look tourism.”

Mr Hamilton, meanwhile, suggested the Government’s PCR test requirements were “discriminatory” in that they only apply to non-vaccinated persons, while adding that persons travelling between Nassau and the Family Islands for work will also be impacted. He also questioned whether the tightened measures mean the Government will extend the COVID-19 emergency orders that are due to expire next month.

“We’re going to have some impact, but couldn’t predict the extent or range we’ll have. We’ve been weathering this for some time,” he told this newspaper. “It’s a matter of rolling with the punches right now and figuring out how best we can respond to this. We have to take it as it’s coming. The authorities make the decision and we have to abide by it....

“I don’t think this is something any of us predicted. It’s a curve ball. The recent decision by the Government is a curve ball, and there will be some impact from that.”

Asked how well the sector had rebounded from the prior year’s COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, Mr Hamilton replied: “There’s been a measure of return in terms of traffic volume, particularly domestic traffic, and we’ve seen the foreign traffic in terms of tourists - we’ve seen some measure of return, not fully but a good measure.

“I’d say we’d seen maybe a 40-50 percent return given the environment. We’ve seen some spurts, particularly when there are holiday situations. There was some measure of movement and we saw them beginning to come back. In that light, we anticipate some degree of slower traffic in light of these measures.”