The country’s leading industry is suffering from anemic growth, according to an industry insider.

Atlantis Senior Vice President Ed Fields said that tourism in the country is not growing at the rate it should be growing and is almost shrinking.

His comments came while he was a guest on the JCN programme “Jones and Company”.

“If you have more people that are reliant on something and you’re not keeping pace with that essentially you’re falling behind.

“We survived for the longest period of time on what we had, we had a very good injection in the 90s with the addition of Atlantis, that saw an addition $2 billion that went into properties around Nassau specifically.

“You had Balmoral, which became Sandals, Ambassador Beach which became Breezes, and then the Hilton, all these things started to take place,” Mr. Fields said.

Mr. Fields added that officials must do more to improve the overall product as opposed to spending millions of dollars solely on marketing.

“What I really feel we’re missing here is product, we spend quite a bit of money on marketing but you don’t see a lot of marketing for places like South Beach, Florida.

“This is because you know the product, the word of mouth, the experience you know this.

“The Bahamas is still a very strong brand we rank extremely high when all the data is compiled, but in terms of what we have to offer, I think we are lacking. We have the capacity but for some reason we just can’t make it happen. We have to start thinking about product and how we create this degree of authenticity, this experience that is The Bahamas,” Mr. Fields said.

Despite The Bahamas’ high rankings in many international polls, the country was issued travel warnings by both the United States and Canada earlier this citing concerns over the increased level of crime in the country.