Sealy: BLP taking credit for projects under my watch

ormer tourism minister Richard Sealy has suggested the current Mia Mottley administration is taking credit for the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) administration’s success on various tourism-related projects now underway.

Sealy, the opposition DLP’s spokesman on the industry, declared that he left all the major ongoing tourism projects on the table after the Freundel Stuart administration was voted out 30-0 in 2018.

“I would think that six years on, that we should have a few new projects and that we shouldn’t be hearing from government ministers, ‘the project is about to start, the project is about to start, is about to start’. Since 2018, we’ve been hearing that. This is now 2024,” he said during the DLP’s The People’s House podcast.

“You go down the list, Sam Lord’s Castle is about to be opened in 2024. In 2018, we had completed, certainly, the showrooms and a couple of the blocks. It should not have taken six years to complete. But anyhow, it’s here and we are happy. 422 rooms; we had it for 450 but that’s not much of a difference. The private sector end of things, the Indigo Hotel that is on Hastings… was a project that was also left on the drawing board.

“…. And the Pierhead even preceded me. That was from the Owen Arthur administration. So we really haven’t seen anything new as far as the projects,” Sealy said.

As the Estimates continued on Monday, Minister of Tourism Ian Gooding-Edghill announced in the House of Assembly that the 93-room, multi-building Savannah Hotel in Hastings Christ Church – part of the state-owned Hotels and Resorts Limited (HRL) portfolio of accommodations – had been sold to “the highest bidder”.

The minister also revealed proposals had been sent out for the sale of the 67-room Blue Horizon Hotel. He said once those requests are evaluated by the board, it will submit a recommendation for the ministry’s consideration.

But, the DLP spokesman on tourism described it as “appropriate” that the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) government should dispose of the assets in the HRL portfolio.

“They were responsible for putting us in that mess in the first place in an earlier administration,” Sealy declared. “So yes, I’m happy to hear. We were able to sell, I think, Time Out at the Gap. [It] was sold under my time. It needed a lot of work and it made sense for the government to get out of the business of running a hotel. Savannah was leased, and I believe that the leaseholder is who is actually going to be purchasing the hotel. The minister promised details and we will await that.”

“But we really haven’t seen a lot of what has been promised by way of hotel development. And it’s important because, in essence, our room stock has remained exactly where it was in 2018. In order for you to grow the sector, to create more jobs, to earn more foreign exchange, to expand the economy, you need more rooms,” he insisted.

On the government’s marketing plan for the industry, the former tourism minister suggested it lacked coherence and had no philosophy.

“I heard the minister try to defend the Cayman Airways flight, putting money in that for a flight that is bringing anywhere from nine to 12 people in when it lands. It doesn’t make any sense. He defends it by saying he’s going to get business from the West Coast of the US. Well, it’s been about three months now. I checked Expedia and Travelocity, I checked the airline websites, and there’s nothing in there about Cayman Airways. Google Travel had it as the 25th choice to get from California to Barbados. They still had American Airlines. They had JetBlue. They even had Air Canada. They had, I think, United. It was the 25th cheapest option to get from California to Barbados.

(RG)