President and CEO of Royal Caribbean International Michael Bayley spoke with ZNS News about the company’s proposed beach club project for Paradise Island. The project has been the subject of much scrutiny from environmental activists and officials of the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort among others.

Bayley said, “the beach club is literally a day on the beach. It is sitting on the beach on a deck chair, there will be some bars and some restaurants and a few pools. And it is literally a place where people can have a Bahamian experience. This will be a win for the Bahamian people because it’ll be up to 49% owned by Bahamians. It’ll be completely operated by Bahamians. Entrepreneurs will have opportunities to provide service and goods to the beach club. So for the community its a win. We also think it’ll be a great win that’ll allow us to bring more guests, more customers to Nassau.”

According to Bayley retailers, the Straw Market and Bay Street will get more customers coming to their outlets.

On the environmental concerns voiced about the project Bayley said, “we want to make sure that we’re managing this in the right way. We’re going through a process now with the government and the DEPP, the environmental protection and planning authority for The Bahamas. And that process requires us to submit all of our plans and those plans once they’re commented on by the DEPP they’re then publicly posted and the public are invited to make comments about the plans and of course those comments will then probably result in maybe some adjustments to the plans and then we’ll go through that process. So we’ve developed, over the decades, a lot of technology as it relates to environmental management and we’re kind of looking forward to sharing our plans because we believe it can be a blueprint for future development in The Bahamas.”

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