Nassau Airport Development Company's (NAD) top official said The Bahamas will likely focus less on direct international flights into various Family Islands in favor of promoting a more centralized structure, with Lynden Pindling International Airport (LPIA) as the active hub servicing the rest of the country.
Speaking with Guardian Business, NAD President and CEO Vernice Walkine touched on NAD's airlift strategy for 2015 - shared by the Ministry of Tourism - which seeks to provide transparency and efficiency in getting visitors to the Family Islands. Despite an earlier emphasis on securing direct flights from the U.S. and Canada into the Family Islands, Walkine argued that LPIA offers a cleaner, cheaper solution in the long run.
"The Ministry of Tourism and Minister [Obie] Wilchcombe are very determined to facilitate a program that would allow for more connections to the Family Islands for Nassau. The reason for that is quite simple -- it's about providing the most attractive pricing and the most convenient and efficient movement of people," said Walkine.
Although 2014 saw some strong improvement in airlift to the Family Islands, particularly Grand Bahama, many family island economies continue to be plagued by somewhat infrequent and unreliable airlift. Business outlook conferences hosted last year in Exuma, Abaco, and Long Island all named airlift and outdated airport facilities as the top impediments to economic growth.
Walkine noted that the success of such an initiative largely rests on streamlining the flight reservation process for visitors by increasing domestic flights' presence on global distribution systems (GDS). The systems enable airlines to tap into traveler preferences through online booking websites that centralize multiple travel-related services, rather than requiring visitors to make separate bookings for family island flights.
Although Walkine noted that increasing the GDS presence for local carriers had long been a priority for the country's aviation and tourism sectors, she said market forces would allow prices to eventually "correct themselves" during the year in order to make connecting flights through LPIA a much more attractive proposition to visitors.
"We need to increase the degree to which people can come into Nassau and connect on one of the domestic carriers seamlessly and conveniently, because they have multiple flights a day to provide multiple options for passengers.
"That's already happening to some degree now, but it's kind of casual where customers are finding routes themselves. That will change," she said.

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