One of Barbados’ top tourism officials is giving a commitment that one of the major hotel brands to come to the island soon, will have a major link with the local agriculture sector.
At the same time, Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Tourism Investment Inc. (BTII) Stuart Layne disclosed that the over 450-room Wyndham Grand Hotel at Sam Lord’s Castle is being positioned to attract more visitors to the island during the slower summer months.
He said with its 20,000 square feet of conference space, the St Philip hotel will also be a major site for the meetings, incentives, conferences and events (MICE) market, and will incorporate a great deal of renewable energy in its operations.
Layne was speaking on a panel during episode 3 of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) Webinar series on Thursday, held under the topic Barbados’ Tourism Development Model: Are We on the Right Path?
Pointing to the importance of attracting more families and business travel during the summer period, Stuart said “If you don’t have a capability of hosting events or meetings or you can’t really accommodate the incentives groups or if you can’t really accommodate families then you are out of the business. You are not going to have summer business.”
He said the Wyndham Grand Hotel at Sam Lord’s Castle was being purpose-built with connecting rooms to attract families. “The MICE market is already abuzz for Sam Lord’s because it is a lot of meeting space,” he said.
“We are purpose-building Sam Lords to sell it in the summer and maybe we will get some winter business but we are not too worried about that. The psychology has been turned on its head to sell in the summer and then see if we can get some winter business which comes naturally because of climatic conditions elsewhere in the world,” he said.
He said officials were busy finalising deals with farmers and education institutions to ensure greater linkages between the hotel and those sectors.
“We are absolutely going to be buying from the community once the standards can be met,” Layne promised.
“We want to have as deep an integration of this industry as possible to address the concerns of leakage. It makes no sense about 70 per cent of your foreign currency being earned from tourism and 50 per cent going back out to buy imports. So if we can fix that backward and forward linkages issues, which Sam Lord’s will be proof of concept – we are designing it for that purpose – then I think we can create a model that we can use elsewhere,” he said.
He said officials were also working with stakeholders to have a solar farm set up to get the majority of the energy needs of the facility from that renewable source.
Layne was careful not to give an opening date for the new hotel but said there were also other far more “revolutionary” levels of the project. “I hope I can bring some pleasant surprises in the very near future.”
“It is about empowering people, it is about sustainable development, it is about moving Barbados in its thinking from being a net importing nation to a net exporting nation. We’ve already done all the calculations and we know exactly the year, day or hour it can happen if we do certain things. That is the vision and vision requires strategy and the strategy require goals, and goals demand objectives and objectives determine we need work plans. Once we have the budget for it we can do it,” he said. (MM)
