Whale Watching Worldwide

The Bahamas
Year Number of
whale
watchers
AAGR: Number of
operators
Direct
expenditures
Indirect
Expenditures
Total
Expenditure
1991 1,000 N/A N/A $1,500,000 $150,000 $1,650,000
1994 1,500 14.5% N/A $2,250,000 $225,000 $2,475,000
1998 1,800 4.7% 10 $2,700,000 $270,000 $2,970,000
2008 3,159 5.8% 11 $3,428,364 $554,947 $3,983,310
Capital City: Nassau
Whale Watch Locations:
01: Grand Bahama
02: Bimini
03: Abaco Island
The Bahamas are renowned for dolphin watching because of the
large numbers of resident dolphins and their tolerance to people
swimming with them. The industry in the 80s and 90s focused
largely on dolphin swimming north of Grand Bahama, then Bimini
and now also includes whale and dolphin watching from Abaco.
There are still few organised tourism trips to spot whales – this
activity in the area is largely research‐based trips. On average, the numbers of people have continued to
grow, despite there being a similar number of operators. The average amount each person is paying for a
trip has fallen – due to the increase in day trips in the past decade.
There remains substantial untapped potential for whale watching especially in the Out or Family Islands
where there is the chance of spotting larger cetaceans as well as the dolphins. However, tourism is generally
less developed on these islands so this is likely to need investment in new infrastructure.
The largest segment of the industry is live‐aboard trips run directly from the United States. These trips are
convenient because some of the islands are very close to US waters and it is mostly US citizens who travel to
The Bahamas. Indeed of eleven organisations running dedicated dolphin watching/swim‐with activities, five
pick‐up from Florida by boat and one includes the US to Bimini flight in the package. These trips are
extremely popular and have very high occupancy rates – usually running full. The benefits of dolphin
tourism to The Bahamas are reduced because these trips are run by US operators out of Florida. Although
they are taxed at 4% of gross and pick up supplies from The Bahamas, they create little other spending
because the trips are all inclusive and guests live on board the vessels.
Two of the organisations are non‐profit and have paying volunteers who assist with their research. There is
an emphasis on longer trips ‐ only three operators run day trips and they all also operate multi‐day
packages. Day trips account for approximately 30% of passenger numbers, but only 5% of direct
expenditure.
Some dive trips benefit from opportunistic whale and dolphin sightings and their presence certainly adds to
the draw of The Bahamas. This value has not been included in calculations – apart from an estimation of
the proportion of those long trips which includes a specific whale watching activity.
Informal land‐based whale watching occurs in an ad hoc manner on the Bahamas, however due to the high
level of informality, no numbers have been included in this estimate. There has also been an intention to
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