Bahamas has set its sights on the Latin America market with a series of new initiatives to encourage hotels and Nassau Airport Development Company (NAD) to provide signage in Spanish.

The new initiative also includes a new website in Spanish; recruiting of a corps of bilingual ambassadors for the People-to-People programme and placement of bilingual ambassadors stationed downtown and at the Lynden Pindling International Airport.

Officials at the Ministry of Tourism are currently discussing with a major publisher the publication of a tourism guidebook in Spanish. In addition, the Ministry has already produced television ads with the objective of pushing the learning of Spanish in the workplace.
The announcement was made on Tuesday, March 15 during a workshop sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism and the Bahamas Hotel Association for stakeholders in the tourism industry.

Director General of Tourism, David Johnson, said: “For many decades now, we have known that the desire to travel to our country from South and Central America is quite high and rising. The means to travel and the language barrier, however, were a hindrance for us, therefore we were unable to capitalise on that demand.”