Opening this year:
The Westin Le Paradis
Beach & Golf Resort, St. Lucia
For three decades,
Bermuda had a moratorium on new-build hotel and resort properties.
That changed, though, at the end of November 2007, when Bermuda’s
premier, Dr. The Honorable Ewart F. Brown Jr., JP, MP, announced
that the Nantucket, Mass.- and New York City-based Scout Real
Estate Capital will build a brand-new, five-star Southampton Beach
Resort.
The resort, for which preliminary
designs will be submitted this year, and which is scheduled to open
sometime in 2010, will be a 150-room oceanside property featuring a
luxury spa and fitness center, among other enticements. The
development marks a new direction for Bermuda. According to Harper
Sibley, the new resort’s managing director, “This project is a
prime example of [Premier Brown’s] commitment to maximizing
Bermuda’s potential as a tourist destination.”
Thirteen hundred miles south, the
Caribbean is beginning a similar turn toward luxury tourism
infrastructure development. Allen Chastenet, minister of tourism
for St. Lucia, as well as chairman of the Barbados-based Caribbean
Tourism Organization, said of his island, “We’ve had high-end
hotels, but they’ve been more boutique. Now we are seeing a huge
injection of new properties.”
A 232-room Westin with 30,000 square
feet of meeting space is due in St. Lucia in 2008, while a 275-room
Ritz-Carlton (with 7,000 square feet of meeting space) and a
200-room Raffles Resort are scheduled to open in 2009 and 2010,
respectively. With these new properties, the island’s hotel
inventory will jump from nearly 4,900 rooms to approximately 5,600
rooms.
The 2007 Caribbean Trends in the Hotel
Industry survey, conducted by Atlanta-based PKF Hospitality
Research and released last November, pointed out that new hotel
development in the region has shifted toward upscale and luxury
resort properties.
“We see a lot of new luxury development
going on,” said Scott Smith, vice president of PKF-HR’s parent
company, PKF Consulting. While there were no hard numbers, recent
projects include the 450-room Riu Palace (3,600 square feet of
meeting space), which opened in Aruba last July, and the 428-room
Hyatt Regency (43,000 square feet of meeting space), which opened
in Trinidad last month.
Among other luxury resort projects
planned are a 125-room Mandarin Oriental in St. Kitts (with a
225-seat ballroom, slated to open in 2010) and a 105-room Four
Seasons in Barbados, scheduled to open in December 2009.