Fifteen thousand rooms could be up for grabs for guests interested in visiting The Bahamas, once the multi-billion-dollar Baha Mar development is completed in 2014.
Baha Mar’s Senior Vice President of Administration and External Relations Roberts Sands told delegates at the 30th Caribbean Marketplace yesterday that there has been no project on this scale in many years.
Sands believes Baha Mar will put The Bahamas in a great marketing position.
He shared that the $2.6 billion project will be built in two substantive phases, which included securing the foot print for the new resort campus.
“As part of its menu of offerings, Baha Mar will offer four brand new hotels. We will build a new convention hotel which has been branded as a grand Hyatt with 700 rooms,” according to Sands. He further revealed that the development will also have a 350-room lifestyle hotel under the Mondrian hotel brand, which is owned by the Morgans Hotel Group.
“Our luxury hotel will be a Rosewood hotel and we will announce very shortly our casino partner, and the casino hotel will be a 1,000-room brand new facility.”
Sands noted that the resort is presently in the process of demolishing the Nassau Beach Hotel and 350 rooms at the Wyndham Nassau Resort.
“Instead of the Wyndham being an 850-room hotel, it will go down to 550 rooms and we will continue to operate the Sheraton Nassau Beach Resort as a 700 room hotel as we have invested $150 million over the last three years,” he said.
“In addition we will have a convention center with 200,000 square feet of combined meeting space. We plan to open around the last quarter of 2014.
“Two years ago we changed our marketing strategy. All of our hotels were Starwood and the economic situation told us that we should not put all our eggs in one basket. By offering these multiple brands, I think we can now enlarge the number of loyal customers that The Bahamas would be able to attract.”
Ground was broken on the development in February 2011. Even though the project initially experienced some delays in regards to securing foreign investment, he categorized those delays as a blessing in disguise.
“By the time we open we would begin to see an upturn in the economy. By the time Baha Mar is complete we would have added an incremental 1,500 new rooms to our inventory and put The Bahamas in the position of having 15,000 rooms,” he shared.
Scieska Adderley
Guardian Business Reporter
