Changing Tides in the Bahamas: Using the Tourism Opportunity Spectrum Across the Sea of Abaco

The crystal clear waters of the Bahamas have drawn tourists for centuries to enjoy sailing protected waters, unparalleled fishing opportunities, snorkeling coral reefs, and relaxing on sandy beaches. As resorts and commercial... [ view full abstract ]

The crystal clear waters of the Bahamas have drawn tourists for centuries to enjoy sailing protected waters, unparalleled fishing opportunities, snorkeling coral reefs, and relaxing on sandy beaches. As resorts and commercial enterprises continue to grow to serve a multitude of expanding preferences, tourism opportunities greatly diversify, and can become seemingly scattered across the landscape.

In response to this diversification, a Bahamian non-profit organization, Friends of the Environment, has envisioned an Abaco Trail that would feature the spectrum of nature-based tourism opportunities across the Abaco islands, and highlight the different types of experiences they offer. One crucial link to creating this unique tourism experience is a method of characterizing these opportunities in a sensible, intuitive manner that both tourism providers and tourists themselves can understand. To this end, we have partnered with Friends of the Environment to collect Tourism Opportunity Spectrum information to help support this effort.

The Tourism Opportunity Spectrum (TOS) is commonly used to gather setting information on natural tourism sites and then characterize this information to depict the types of experiences most common across an area. It utilizes information on important tourism conditions of site access, compatibility of other uses, control of visitor experience, tourism impacts, onsite management, and social perceptions of visitors and hosts.

TOS data was collected for nine sites for potential inclusion in the Abaco Trail. Sites include Marsh Harbour, Mermaid Reef, Hopetown, Sandy Cay Reef, and others. Results show that particular conditions can impact their potential use in the Abaco Trail, such as Site Access, and Onsite Management, while others (such as Tourism Impacts and Social Perceptions) may be more easily integrated into the trail development process. This presentation will show these results as well as visual, color-coded maps that depict the different site conditions within each site, and also compare and contrast these results across different sites throughout the Sea of Abaco. An overall map will show the differing site conditions and opportunities, while individual maps will depict site-specific conditions and how these may change based on future expansion plans in the Bahamas.