First in a series on a four-day trade mission to the Bahamas.
We arrived in Nassau, the Bahamas, yesterday at 1:10 p.m.
“It’s not hot enough for me,” said Keith W. Stokes, director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, half joking, as we stepped off the plane onto the sunny tarmac.
Just five hours earlier, our nine-person delegation had been slightly shivery as we waited to board the plane that would take us to the Bahamas, an overcast Rhode Island sky shading our departure.
Chris Lee, a principal of North Kingstown-based Sea Fresh USA, said he hadn’t been to Nassau since spring break in college. John Nunes, co-owner of Newport Vineyards, said the same as we rode from our hotel to an informal reception at the home of the charge de affairs for the U.S. Embassy, Brendt Hardt.
But things have changed since then, both in the Bahamas and with its visitors.
Lee and Nunes chose to join a four-day trade mission – organized by Maureen Mezei, international trade director at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, through the R.I. National Guard’s year-and-a-half old State Partnership Program – because they see the Bahamas as a potential market for their goods.
The trip is “more exploratory than anything,” Nunes said. His family has owned Newport Vineyards for 12 harvests and over the last 10 years has grown from harvesting 10 acres to harvesting 50 acres.
But the company rarely sells wine outside one-hour-drive radius of the vineyards. It doesn’t have to, because Newport tourists keep sales up.
The question Nunes will try to answer during the next few days: What if the same tourists who buy his wine in Newport would travel to the Bahamas and buy the wine here as well?
And if it is a possibility … how would that work?
Others on the trade mission – including John Grosvenor, CEO and co-founder of Newport Collaborative, the largest architecture firm in the state, and Eric Offenberg, founder of Middletown-based North East Engineers – came along to find a market for their services in the Bahamas.
And Stokes came to start exploring potential marketing ties between the Bahamian tourism market and the Newport tourism market. He also came to share cultural heritage tourism best practices at a business development seminar hosted by the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Embassy and the Bahamas Development Bank.
Capt. Michael Manning’s objective is to grow and expand the R.I. National Guard’s State Partnership Program, which was started by the U.S. National Guard at the end of the Cold War to help countries build democratic governments.
Manning, the SPP coordinator for the Guard, said his superiors have given him liberty to explore different types of exchanges that can be made between Rhode Island and the Bahamas, and he hopes this will be the first of many.
