Dear Sir,

Now that I have been retired for a number of years, I catch the ferries leaving from Dockyard every week, and today (Sunday, November 26) I was waiting to catch the 9.45am ferry into Hamilton.

There was a cruise ship that came in at 8.30am with more than 3,000 passengers and the Visitor Services Centre does not open until 10am on Sundays. Tourists were not able to buy tokens, passes, get maps, and also there was no one there from the Bermuda Tourism Authority to provide information.

Hello! I have seen this happen before; it is not the first time. I know that you can pay $5 cash per person on the ferry, but the ferry personnel don’t give change, and rightly so. If you don’t have the right money, you cannot get on the ferry.

Does anyone from the BTA know the 2023 Bermuda cruise ship schedule? Let me answer that: no! Does anyone from the BTA know that a lot of these cruise-ship passengers have never been here before? I meet a lot of tourists who have never been to Bermuda and just today I met two different couples off the cruise ship who are here for the first time.

The BTA is very fortunate that myself and a few other Bermudians are saving its you know what in Dockyard and on the ferries, giving out information to many tourists every week. I think that they should be paying me! It would be money well spent.

When a cruise ship is in port in Dockyard on a Sunday, the Visitor Services Centre needs to be opened a lot earlier than 10am.

Where is the tourism minister anyway?

DEREK MADEIROS

Southampton