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BHTA optimistic more entities will sign on BEST

by Barbados Today Traffic
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by Marlon Madden

As Cabinet gets ready to approve changes to a plan that was set up to help keep tourism industry workers employed, and with a dramatic reduction in tourism arrivals, more hoteliers have been applying for financial assistance.

Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) Senator Rudy Grant reported that to date some 55 hotels have applied for assistance under the Barbados Employment and Sustainable Transformation (BEST) programme, with 40 of them being approved.

Under the employment component, businesses are expected to re-hire all of their workers on 80 per cent or their normal salary for up to two years, should the need arise.

In addition to the employment and training component, the BEST programme, which was introduced towards the end of September last year, also offers businesses a $2 million cap for investment in upgrade of their facilities.

Grant, who was responding to a question from Today’s business during the association’s recent regular industry update, said “most of the applicants are utilising the training component”.

“That is a critical component. The major emphasis is ensuring the engagement of employees,” said Grant, who revealed that businesses had to submit training plans to receive the assistance.

“To date, there have been 55 applications made. There have been 40 applications that have been approved. That was for an amount in the vicinity of just over $9 million and for just over 2, 035 employees,” he said.

This is an improvement over the just under 30 hotels that applied up to the end of November last year.

The BHTA represents in excess of 100 members, which include operators of hotels, villas, apartments and guesthouses, restaurants, and tour companies, as well as direct tourism services and support services.

Agreeing there was still some hesitance among some tourism operators to sign on to the BEST programme, especially for the investment component, Grant said the approval by Cabinet to the changes and recent dramatic declines in visitor arrivals should also result in a wider take up.

“We are optimistic that we will see some adjustments and optimistic that more tourism enterprises will participate in the
BEST programme,” he said.

The tourism top brass opted not to say exactly what changes were pending, but revealed that “there are some issues that members would have spoken to us about and we did have discussions with government in relation to those.

“There have been some adjustments at the technical level that have been agreed to but they need to have the approval of Cabinet before any statement can be made in relation to that”.

He said the agreement to make adjustments came following discussions between the BHTA; the Ministry of Tourism; The Enterprise Growth Fund Ltd, which is responsible for the administration of the funds; and the Ministry of Finance.

As it now stands, under the investment component of the plan, entities are required to issue preference shares to government. They would be required to pay back the investment before owners can be paid and any dividends or increased fees, or sell assets.

However, some hoteliers have already raised objection to that component of the plan, even describing it as a debt trap that could drive hoteliers out of business.

In early December last year, Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Mia Mottley noted that it was always expected that there would not be 100 per cent take up of the plan given that some entities were owned by multinational corporations.

“We always knew that the hotels that were owned by multinational corporations were unlikely to come in because of structure of preference shares, but we recognise that after entreaties from the Barbados Hotel anwwd Tourism Association, that there may be some hotels who prefer to take ordinary debt rather than to have preference shares and we are reviewing that now,” Mottley said then, as she hinted to the change to come during the Caribbean Economic Forum hosted by the Central Bank of Barbados.

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