Tourism Minister focuses on increasing accommodation numbers

Work will soon be going full steam ahead at the Sam Lord’s Castle project.

As he denied claims that the project was being postponed, Tourism Minister Richard Sealy stated that over the past months, work had been happening at the St. Philip site within the storage and office areas, before disclosing that an injection of funds for major work from China was scheduled for this week.

“The information I have is that on Tuesday, March 7, $20 million will be coming from the EximBank and will go to the contractor so that they can start the first block that will actually be going up as well. Again, Sam Lord’s…450 suites, with well over 1 000 construction jobs and that will give way to 1 200 jobs, we are starting to see how we are pulling this together,” he said.

Sealy insisted that his department was focused on increasing accommodation numbers within the industry, moving the number from 5 500, to that of almost 8 000 by 2021, in order to facilitate the record numbers of visitors the island had been achieving over the past two years.

The minister spoke on the expansion work being done at Sandals in Dover, stating that this additional 220 rooms would bring that plant’s capacity to 500. In addition, he pointed out that the Sandals Beaches at Heywoods was scheduled to begin in April 2018, and run until 2020, employing up to 1 500 people when it was completed.

“The Hyatt-Centric is just over 200 rooms and will empty 500 people when it is finished, so the predication that we are going to create these jobs are not founded in anything unrealistic,” he continued, while delivering his report to party faithfuls at Queen’s College on Saturday during the mid-year conference.
In addition, he revealed that the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association had indicated that some 52 plants were under refurbishment; a boon, Sealy stated, for the industry.

He stressed that it was critical to continue to build out the tourism sector, while admittedly it was the subject to exogenous shocks, “nothing is more resilient than tourism”. (JMB)