Transform sector

Chairman of Intimate Hotels of Barbados (IHB), Mahmood Patel has admitted that the non-profit company representing small hotels, apartments, guest houses and villas, dropped the ball by not pushing ahead with previous plans to set up a co-operative.

“The DNA of the IHB should have been a co-operative,” he insisted during the IHB’s end-of-year meeting yesterday, while recalling that 20 years ago the Enterprise Growth Fund Limited (EGFL) had given the IHB $2 million to do so.

“I think that somehow along the line we dropped the ball spending that money apparently on road shows, marketing and so on. This is a good moment right now, 20 years later, to look at this again; to revisit the idea of us working together as a cluster, so that we can have economies of scale and we can do things collectively.”

He urged members gathered at Infinity on the Beach, St. Lawrence Gap to be proactive, stressing “let us use transformation right now to lead the recovery”.

Patel therefore went on to reveal IHB’s future plans to establish a Solar Farm, an idea which he told members EGFL has bought into.

“One of the things that EGFL would be really willing to fund is the idea of a solar farm. So, all of us have small hotels, maybe small roof spaces, but one of the things we need to look at is energy security. So, EGFL is willing to walk with us and actualise and implement a solar farm that belongs to the IHB,” he disclosed.

“We could find land and an organisation is already willing to give us three to five acres of land funded through the EGFL, where all of us as shareholders could work out the square foot space or usage of electricity, plus some additional capacity. There are also willing to say we could finance at a very reduced interest-rate, plus a longer term to repay. So, the IHB could then earn money itself – the secretariat could move away from being dependent on state funding.

“I would really wish that all the members buy into this idea because it is one way we could earn some money in the long-term individually as members, but also it would create a revenue stream for the secretariat to survive on its own. And with this revenue that the IHB should earn we could then look at things like digitization, robotics, and even use this fund then to help out moving towards being a cooperative,” he said.

The Chairman further expressed that the IHB can become a model of a new type of tourism looking at green initiatives, also embracing water conservation, water recycling and re-use.

“We should use tourism in Barbados to pull other sectors and create linkages with agriculture, energy, food security, agro-processing and so on… Tourism should be the vehicle to pull the other sectors along,” he added.

Dr. Justin Ram, Economic/Technical Advisor to the Prime Minister reiterated to IHB members that “the recovery has to be the transformation”.

“We really can’t wait until after the recovery to consider transformation, that is how we are going to recover,” he pointed out.

“And I think what we are seeing in the global economy right now is that things that we probably expected to occur ten years from now is actually happening now, so the future is actually now – and now we must transform in order to recover fully”.