Chinese work on new stadium to be finished by June
The new national stadium is scheduled to be turned over to the Bahamian government in June of this year. The announcement was made recently at a special dinner to celebrate the arrival of the first group of leisure travelers from China.
Minister of Tourism, Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, who attended the dinner, said the new stadium and Baha Mar projects are wonderful examples of great public and private sector cooperation in growing a very important part of the Bahamian economy.
“There are few countries in the world that are spending as much on infrastructure development as the Commonwealth of the Bahamas now,” he said.
The tourism minister said that the airport gateway project, which will be starting very soon, is also a very significant development for the Bahamas.
“The kind of investment that we’re having in this facility at Baha Mar, something in the order of $2.6 billion, is an astonishing spend for a country of our size and so very important to the development of our tourism industry.”
The Ministry of Tourism has made some progress in its attempt to capture part of the Chinese travel market through various marketing and government initiatives.
“I am delighted to have been very much involved in gaining approved destination status for the Bahamas and also a number of other Caribbean countries at the time when we started to talk about making the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean available and open to Chinese travelers,” Minister Vanderpool-Wallace said.
In addition to the approved destination status, the Bahamas opened an embassy in Beijing to allow for visas to be distributed to Chinese travelers coming to the Bahamas. Bahamas.com – the country’s chief online promotional tool – is also available in Chinese so that potential visitors are able to see the best of what the Bahamas has to offer.
