By ANGELO ARMBRISTER

Freeport News Reporter

The Grand Bahama Taxi Union is taking strong exception to comments made by the Minister of Tourism at a town meeting last week, saying the ministry needs to stop pointing fingers and work to solve the problem.

During the meeting, the minister made mention that among the major complaints that his ministry has received as it related to Grand Bahama was poor ground transportation, which included over charging and bad service among other things.

In an exclusive interview with The Freeport News, GB Taxi Union President Kenneth Woodside said that the union does not condone the actions of dishonest taxi drivers, but he feels it is unfair for the ministry to blame the problems of the tourism industry on taxi drivers.

"We are not knocking the messenger, we know that the minister, like he says, has a passion and we agree with his passion. We are concerned with tourism and we are not defending some of those taxi drivers, who we know over charge and don't give good customer service. We realize that we have our short comings," Woodside said. "Some cab drivers, yes they are dishonest and we have to get them out, but the way to deal with that is to educate the taxi drivers, to show them how important customer service is to the tourism industry and how important the industry is to the economy."

Geralene Dean, Recording Secretary for the Grand Bahama Taxi Union suggested that the tourism product will never improve if, "we continue to play the blame game."

"Let us all stop pointing fingers and get together and fix the problem. Have a group from the taxi drivers, one from the straw vendors, another from the tour operators and so on and let us get together like once a month and let the Ministry of Tourism tell us what the complaints are and we can work on them and make our tourism product a better product," she said.

Noting that taxi drivers throughout The Bahamas have acted as ambassadors for the country for years, Dean said it is unfortunate that the public perception of them has since turned negative.

"We were the apple of the tourism industry's eye, now that the industry is in trouble everyone wants to blame us, but there is the clerk in the stores, the folks behind the front desks of hotels, customs, immigration, law enforcement, the hackers, the tour operators, the bus drivers, timeshare persons, restaurant employees and of course the taxi drivers, all of us need to take responsibility for our actions collectively," she said. "If we work together we can move mountains."

The Union official said one problem she had with the minister's statement was that thousands of dollars were refunded to passengers from the cruise line. She said that it was not true in it's entirety.

"On the day in question, which was the Discovery Day holiday, we the Grand Bahama Taxi Union moved over 1,150 persons and we only had to refund 11 passengers," she said.

"Now it is normal sometimes for some of our guests not to be pleased with the product," she said. "That problem was addressed before their ship left port."

Dean added that there is a lot of law breaking going on as it relates to the Road Traffic Act. She said that the hotels have courtesy vans that operate and that there are a lot of hackers operating out of the airport at the harbour and at hotels.

This, Dean says sometimes contributes to the disparity in the fees charges, but no one knows this and so the blame always falls back on the taxi drivers.

"Our fees are governed by a set rate, but when tourists jump into a bus or car they automatically associate it with a taxi driver, but that is not always the case," she explained.

"We know that there are a few bad apples in the bunch, get rid of them because that apple is spoiling the whole bunch."

Calling for an apology by the Minister, the Union said that it was willing to work hand-in-hand with the Ministry of Tourism to improve the tourism product.