What the most digitally ready Bahamian businesses have in common

Which industries reach All Doors Open

The index reads Four Digital Doors: a Google Business Profile, a website, a Facebook Page and WhatsApp. A business with all four open is at the top stage, which the index calls All Doors Open.

Every industry has businesses at the top stage. What differs is how often, once each industry is counted against its own size. Tourism reaches it far more often than any other industry. Restaurants hold the second-largest group only because Restaurants is the largest industry. Counted against its size, it sits just under the national rate, as salons do. Retail shops and professional firms reach the top stage least often.

Why Tourism may lead

The index does not record who a business’s customers are. But a tourism business serves two kinds of customer: people who live here, and visitors. The visitor is the one more likely to depend on what can be found online.

The Ministry of Tourism surveys visitors who stay on the islands, rather than on a cruise ship, as they leave. In its 2024 survey, 70% booked some or all of the trip through an online service. In 2021, the last year the Ministry published how visitors planned, 82% named the internet as the electronic media they used most to plan the trip.

Asked in 2021 which search engines and social sites they used at all, 84% named Google. Cruise passengers were not asked, and they are most visitors: most of the 12.5 million who came in 2025 arrived by cruise ship, the Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation reported.

In 2024, few of the visitors surveyed came to see people they know here: 2% came to visit friends or family. In 2021, the largest group booked the trip one to three months before they travelled. The survey does not ask how they chose a tour, a car or a table. But a visitor who plans and books the trip online, weeks ahead, is likely to meet many businesses online first. A resident can ask someone they know. In 2024, 61% of the visitors surveyed had been before, so some already knew where to go. Even so, most of them booked online.

Part of Tourism’s lead comes from how the index found its businesses. It found most of them in a Bahamian business directory, then looked for each one’s Google listing, which it could fail to find. It found the others by searching Google in December 2025, and every business found that way already has a Google listing. The ones found by searching Google reach the top stage far more often, as the table shows.

Even against the directory-found tourism businesses that have a Google listing, those found by searching Google were more often on the other three doors, which fits Google’s own guidance that better-known places are more likely to show up in its search results. Tourism’s directory-found businesses still reach the top stage more often than any other large industry found the same way, but the gap is much smaller. So Tourism leads the large industries either way, by less than the figure suggests.

The index’s own records lean toward visitors too. Where they hold a finer category than the industry, the top stage tends toward work a visitor buys. Four of the seven Auto Services businesses at the top stage rent cars, and spas are the largest group among the salons. Not everything fits. None of the 53 businesses the index records as hotels is at the top stage, and the index found WhatsApp for only 3 of them. And most of the few Retail businesses at the top stage sell women’s clothing. The finer category is recorded for about half of the businesses at the top stage.

Two other reasons may add to Tourism’s lead. The Ministry has worked to get tourism businesses onto Google. It invited hotels, tour operators and restaurants to a Google Business Profile webinar, set for 25 September 2025. Bigger businesses also more often have a website. In a 2011 survey of Bahamian firms, funded by Compete Caribbean, 37.2% of small firms had a website, against 81.4% of large firms. The index records neither a business’s size nor its customers, so apart from how it found its businesses, it cannot say how much each reason counts.

Who reaches the top stage, inside their own industry

A fair test compares a business at the top stage only with others in the same industry that also have a Google listing. Read that way, in the edition’s own records, two things set the top stage apart.

They own their listing. In seven of the eight industries, businesses at the top stage have claimed their Google listing more often than the rest of their industry, counting only listings whose claim status is known.

They are rated higher. In seven of the eight industries, the typical top-stage listing is rated above the rest of its industry, and in the eighth, a small group, the two are level. “Typical” here means the median: line the listings up and take the one in the middle.

Their review counts set them apart less. The typical top-stage listing has more Google reviews than the rest of its industry in five of the eight industries, but top-stage restaurants have fewer than other restaurants with a listing. Across the whole index, businesses with a Google listing and four doors open have about the same typical number of reviews as those with three: 29 at four doors and 30 at three, in the Review Ladder figures on The Index. So a business with all four doors open is not simply the busiest in its industry. More often, it is one whose owner has taken charge of the listing, and whose customers rate it well. The index cannot say which comes first: the doors, or a well-run business that keeps a good listing and opens more doors at the same time.

Most of these businesses, 101 of the 112, are in Nassau and Paradise Island. Part of that is where the index looked, since most of the businesses it read are there. Another part follows one door. All four needs WhatsApp, and the index found WhatsApp less than half as often outside Nassau. “Found” means found in public sources, so a number shared by word of mouth can be missed.

What a programme can do with this

Set the target by industry. No industry in the index is expected to open all four doors. Each industry has Required doors, the ones central to how its customers find, trust and contact a business. For Tourism they are Google, a website and WhatsApp, and for restaurants Google, Facebook and WhatsApp. The Four Digital Doors guide lists them for every industry. The stage for having every Required door open is Expected Doors Open, and for most programmes it is the benchmark to set.

Start where being found matters most. If the visitor reason holds, businesses that sell to visitors stand to gain most from a listing a visitor can find and trust before arriving: tour operators, car rental firms, and the restaurants and spas visitors use.

Compare within an industry. Development workers call this positive deviance: in any group, a few do better than peers with the same resources, and others can learn from how they work. UNDP’s Accelerator Labs use existing data to find these outperformers before meeting them. The method holds only among peers who share the same resources. A retail shop will learn more from the retail shops at the top of its own industry than from a hotel.

Some programmes already reach owners on the Family Islands. The Small Business Development Centre’s Back to Da’ Island Initiative 2026 supports Family Island entrepreneurs. DigiLearn Bahamas, a government skills programme, runs a cohort of its BTVI courses, E-Commerce Essentials among them, for New Providence, Cat Island and Abaco from 14 September to 3 December 2026. A Family Island cohort could start from the owners these programmes already reach, and read their doors when it begins.

Measure the programme by reading its own businesses before and after. The index shows only which things go together.

What an owner who serves visitors can check

If visitors are your customers, look at your business the way they do: on Google, from abroad, before they arrive. Check that you have claimed your listing, that it shows your opening hours and photos, and that it gives a website or a way to message you.

Most of the Ministry’s surveyed visitors come from the United States, so a survey of people there shows the bar they bring. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US adults, 31% said they would only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher. That is exactly the typical rating for the rest of Tourism, and the typical top-stage tourism listing sits above it. Google says complete details, more reviews and good ratings can help a listing show in local results.

Start with whichever of those your listing is missing. The Google Business Profile guide explains how to claim a listing and how long Google’s check can take.