Director for Religious Tourism Dwight Armbrister said yesterday that the growing field offered "huge" revenue opportunities for The Bahamas.
Speaking with Guardian Business, Armbrister said that the Ministry of Tourism would focus on marketing The Bahamas as a destination for religious events, particularly conferences with capacities between 3,000-4,000.
"Globally, 9.8 percent of the traveling public travels for religious events. We're going after a portion of that. If we can get a minute percentage of that number coming to The Bahamas, we wouldn't have sufficient rooms to accommodate them. It would be huge for The Bahamas," said Armbrister.
Although The Bahamas lacks the established religious festivals of many regional tourism competitors, Armbrister argued that The Bahamas' close proximity to the U.S. acted as a strong incentive for U.S. religious organizations.
"Our proximity to the U.S. counts for quite a bit of our attractiveness for religious tourism. So our focus then is to focus in on specific markets, particularly the African-American and Hispanic markets within certain states within the United States," said Armbrister.
Armbrister could not provide any figures for government investment in the initiative, suggesting only that the program was still in its infancy and would continue to "aggressively" lay the groundwork for religious conventions in the country to complement the Ministry of Tourism's similar attempts to diversify its tourism product.
"We have all of these different vertical tourism markets - religious tourism, sports, weddings and honeymoons - people travel to The Bahamas for that kind of focused attention.
"That's what keeps us on the cutting edge against our competitors. They may not be doing it the way we do, but we're going to do it to the best of our ability to ensure that [tourists] come here as opposed to choosing any other Caribbean country," said Armbrister.
Armbrister added that Impact, BET, and Tempo networks would be in the country next week for the FAMFEST gospel music festival, providing increased international exposure, after a host of media events with Christian media outlets.
"For the past 10 days, The Bahamas was at the center of the discussion on the Impact Network whose viewing audience is some 30-plus million.
"Two nights ago, TBN did their Praise the Lord program on the island of Grand Bahama for two hours highlighting the beauty, culture and the different sights of the island. When you talk about the viewership numbers you are looking at hundreds of millions around the world," said Armbrister.
Armbrister added that the religious tourism department had already held talks with several international large church groups including the National Baptist Convention USA, The Rainbow Push Coalition, affiliated with Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the SDA Conference.

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