12 SUNDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2022
BUSINESS
SUNDAY EXPRESS
COMMENTARY
Kilgwyn Bay hotel is 5-star
MADNESS BY MARK MEREDITH
HOT on the heels of the announcement of Virgin Atlantic’s pullout from Tobago at year’s end, Tobagonians are being promised a new five-star hotel in a “virgin” area of Tobago to go with the 216room Marriott hotel and real estate development, already promised at Mt Irvine’s ecologically fragile Rocky Point. “I’m not at liberty to give the name but they are about to start construction in June 2023 at the Kilgwyn Bay area. And guess what... in this area, no hotels exist. So you are talking about virgin land, virgin beach opportunities, even more suites to make the romance sweeter,” Tobago Chief Secretary (THA) Farley Augustine said in a sales pitch to his audience at the World Travel Market (WTM). The question needs to be asked: have the THA and its mystery fivestar developers taken leave of their senses? Because what they should have asked themselves is why there are no hotels in that area. According to local sources, the area around Kilgwyn Bay and Canoe Bay is entirely unsuitable for any hotel development, even a shack, let alone a five-star resort. The sources described an “extremely polluted dead zone of an inshore lagoon, contained by a healthy mangrove and beach sand barrier”. This lagoon was the end zone of a leach field, the recipient of toxins from an old garbage dump, and covers an area of at least eight acres and is of unknown depth. It shrinks and expands with the seasons. If that weren’t bad enough, the area is plagued by “extreme sandfly, mosquito and black fly infestation”. Furthermore, the “torpidity of the near-shore area hides the fact that the beach is the rubble area of a very large active reef system and is utterly unfit for bathing, added to which it is very shallow, knee to upper thigh, and gets very warm at low tides,” said a source. If the idea of putting a five-star resort in such an area seems crazy, the airport runway’s end sits a few hundred feet away. Under T&T law, no commercial or residential development is allowed within a short distance of an airport runway flight path.
Why the THA, and mystery developers, believe anyone would choose to stay in such an area, let alone as five-star guests, is unfathomable. For critics it is further proof of Tobago’s confused and directionless tourism strategy. For instance, there is the irony of Augustine declaring the reopening of a dive-based hotel in Speyside, Manta Lodge, as an example of nature-based tourism while sanctioning the possible destruction of other coral reefs by constructing two new hotels above them. Critics of THA tourism policy say that developing and improving the product of small hotels, like Manta Lodge, and guest houses which already exist, is exactly the type of tourism they should be pursuing. It promotes the natural beauty and unspoiled nature that is Tobago’s true selling point, and is at its most successful in Castara. But like all THA administrations which have gone before, this one’s head has been turned by five-star hotel and branding bling, rather than following its own tourism agency’s marketing of Tobago as “Beyond Ordinary... Where unspoilt traditions, untouched natural beauty and undiscovered gems merge to create the idyllic Caribbean escape”. In order to cater to the many tens of thousands of extra tourists the THA expects to fill the “Kilgwyn fivestar”, and Marriott at Rocky Point (where the Environmental Management Authority has demanded an Environment Impact Assessment), Augustine confirmed a huge expansion of ANR Robinson Airport would go ahead. “When that terminal is completed, it will be one of the largest in the Caribbean region and will be able to facilitate all of you and tonnes more. You heard about all of the new airlift arrangements that we are currently planning and we are preparing for you,” he told the World Travel Market. Because the THA managed to lose Virgin Atlantic’s flights, their logic is they need to find new airlift to carry passengers. But will new flights, if they can be attracted by Tobago’s ever-diminishing international visitor arrivals, reverse the declining trend? No, say critics, the THA is putting the cart before the horse.
VIEW FROM ABOVE: This Google Maps image of the Kilgwyn Bay area shows the Kilgwyn Bay Estate divided by the Store Bay Local Extension Road and the property’s proximity to the runway of the ANR Robinson International Airport in Tobago.
SILVER AWARD: Lyn Hughes, second from left, Wanderlust founding editor, celebrates Tobago’s success with Alicia Edwards, left, the Tobago Tourism Agency’s executive chairman; Farley Augustine, Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly; and councillor Tashia Burris, Secretary of Tourism, Culture, Antiquities and Transportation. Tobago won silver in the Most Desirable Island category at the Wanderlust Travel Awards in London, England, on Wednesday night.
A retired T&T tourism marketing professional friend lamented on social media after the pullout of Virgin: “When will those who administer tourism initiatives understand that airlines do not create demand; they follow demand.” How is it that a product as unique and lovely as Tobago cannot attract demand from the UK to make a subsidised Virgin Atlantic flight profitable enough to keep servicing the island? While at the World Travel Market jamboree, Augustine and his team talked up new projects and flights to be sourced from somewhere. But no mention was made, or reported, about ramping-up the marketing budget by the order of magnitude needed to saturate media in their target countries of choice: the US, UK, Canada, Germany and Scandinavia. Take a trawl through social media to see commentary about T&T’s tourism’s complete invisibility in these countries. Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association vice-president Carol-Ann Birchwood-James was reported to be asking for five per cent of Tobago’s $2.357 billion budget to be spent on tourism marketing, up from the current four per cent. By comparison, Jamaica spends 17 per cent of its national budget
on tourism promotion, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). In the WTTC 2022 table on travel and tourism’s GDP growth in 2019, out of 23 Caribbean countries T&T comes last, one of only two countries recording negative growth: -2.2 per cent in our case; Jamaica +12.1 per cent. Augustine’s pronouncements in London illustrate the THA is not only ignoring its own branding of Tobago’s unspoiled natural attractions by sanctioning the Marriott and Kilgwyn projects in ecologically fragile areas, they haven’t read the WTTC’s advice on the way forward for Caribbean tourism. The WTTC says the “pandemic has accelerated the trend of travellers wanting to go beyond traditional urban centres to visit rural areas”. They recommend: “With an increasing number of travellers looking for sustainable options with a minimal environmental impact, governments and businesses need to invest in, and provide, sustainable products and services.” The WTTC has produced an entire booklet called “Nature Positive Travel & Tourism—Travelling in harmony with nature”, presumably unread by the THA. The disconnect between WTTC advice and current plans being
pursued by the THA caused even the mild-mannered T&T Green Building Council to castigate the Marriott plans at Mt Irvine, revealed in the Sunday Express in August, as having “Zero Regard For Our Environment And Future”. While at Tobago’s most famous tourist beach, Pigeon Point, the THA has controversially awarded a $54,781,820 Milford Court/Pigeon Point Connector Road contract. This made news, but not that the road they propose building runs through a Ramsar site wetland system alongside a designated marine reserve with extensive healthy mangrove features. In London at the beginning of the World Travel Market, the THA’s disconnect with the real world of tourism was apparent again: Augustine said they would be “trying” to make deals, “trying” for investments like hotels, “trying to get airlines from areas around the world—to market Tobago, which for the most part has been undiscovered, untouched, unspoilt”. But it has been discovered, and touched, but those international tourists have voted with their feet and left. Unspoilt, yes, but for how much longer? That is the question posed by those who understand that Tobago is headed down an unsustainable path, in more ways than one.