Kerzner International is seeking compensation from the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) for the losses it suffered as a result of a massive system blackout on June 18, Kerzner Bahamas President and Managing Director George Markantonis has confirmed.
"I think it was obviously very irritating for our customers and certainly for first-time visitors; it was not the kind of memory that we would like to leave them with," said Markantonis when asked by The Nassau Guardian about the impact the outage had on Kerzner's business.
"But I'd also like to think that a lot of our customers are sophisticated enough and have been here before to know that this is not the norm."
Markantonis said he could not give any specifics on the amount of compensation Kerzner is seeking.
The nationwide system outage disrupted services to more than 300,000 mobile, landline and broadband customers, BTC reported last month.
BTC customers were unable to make mobile or landline calls, send text messages or access broadband Internet services provided by BTC.
Numerous business people have spoken of the significant negative impact the outage had on their operations.
BTC CEO Geoff Houston said previously the outage was the worst he had witnessed in his 25 plus years in telecommunications.
Markantonis said Kerzner International is hopeful that such a widespread system failure will be avoided in the future.
"Senior representatives in our information systems division are in communication with their colleagues at BTC, primarily to ensure that we offer every assistance in avoiding recurrences of this nature in the future," he told The Guardian.
"Naturally, as disruptive as they are to the local public, telecommunications issues also affect the thousands of hotel guests that we have here during our high season.
"We understand that these things can happen and we just hope that we will eventually get our infrastructure in the country to the stage where they are very, very infrequent."
Yesterday, the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) confirmed that it received a report from BTC explaining the system failure.
BTC officials would not publicly speak about the Kerzner compensation request.
A statement from the company yesterday said, "BTC is committed to ensuring that it provides a level of service of premium quality to the public consistent with its licence obligation to maintain a properly functioning public network."
The company said network failures are not everyday occurrences, but they do occur.
"BTC is satisfied that it did everything that it could to restore service as quickly as possible in order to minimize service disruptions," the statement said.
"BTC notes that two major operators in Europe, O2 in the UK with eight million mobile subscribers and France Telecom with 18 million subscribers, had outages of 24 hours duration in the past two weeks and so these outages are not uncommon to networks which rely so heavily on advanced technologies for their proper functioning."
Not long after the system failure, BTC offered customers a "goodwill package" it said amounted to $3 million.
It is unclear whether businesses other than Kerzner have also sought compensation from BTC as a result of the failure of the company's networks.
While there has not been a widespread outage since June 18, BTC systems remain plagued with challenges.

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