by S Brian Samuel
Picture the scene: It’s cruise ship day in Grenada, and two giant ships are docked at the Cruise Port, a third at the Cargo Port, and a fourth is anchored offshore.
Including off-duty crew members, up to 20,000 sun- and fun-seeking visitors descend on the island, temporarily increasing its population by one-fifth. Onshore it’s a soup: thousands of tourists are strolling through town, looking for the best duty-free bargains, or just looking. Every shop, restaurant and bar is packed, the streets are so crowded you can barely move. Offshore, catamarans and speedboats are whizzing up and down, water taxis are ferrying tanned tourists to and from Grand Anse Beach, brimming sand-to-sea with deckchairs. Vendors are happy; shopkeepers are happy; restaurants are happy; taxi drivers are happy. And tourists are happy – a win-win, right? Wrong.
You know who aren’t happy? Grenada’s tourists. By whom I mean Grenada’s real tourists: the ones who spend real money. My brother and sister-in-law, Gerry and Pat, are Grenada’s archetypal tourist: they live in Wimbledon and should get gold medals, for the number of times they’ve visited Grenada. They love Grenada’s laid-back tranquility, the friendliness of its people, and most of all the absence of crowds. Except on cruise ship days; they abhor cruise ship days, when they flee from the overcrowded beach and hole up in their room. The old people (i.e. us!) have a term for this: cutting off your nose, to spite your face.
We are pissing off real tourists, those who spend in excess of US$1,000 per visit, to please masses of day-trippers who, according to the cruise ship industry’s own survey, spend a paltry US$45 per visit. Why? Because of numbers, and our politicians’ addiction to big ones. Jamaica’s Tourism Minister Ed Bartlett loves to boast how Jamaica received 1.5 million cruise ship visitors in 2019; but he wasn’t pleased, when I asked him at a conference: Yes Minister, but how much do they spend? Ask the same question to any vendor at the Falmouth Cruise Terminal – you won’t be able to print the answer.
But this is what Caribbean tourism has become: quantity over quality; numbers over impact; size over sustainability. We, and I mean all of us: governments, investors, financiers and so-called experts like me; have been so caught up on numbers – numbers of hotel rooms, numbers of tourists, numbers of flights – that we have totally failed to see the bigger picture: that endless growth, in a finite and usually small island, is (a) short-sighted; (b) misguided; and (c) simply impossible.
Even after the lessons of the Covid pandemic should be clear for all to see, Grenada is continuing with this folly. The government is simultaneously pursuing two multi-billion dollar, Chinese-backed tourism projects: one at Levera, a pristine beach to the north of the island, home to the highly endangered Leatherback Turtle; and another at Mount Hartman, a pristine National Park and home to the highly endangered Grenada Dove. There are only two words that can describe these projects, with thanks to HRH Prince Charles: monstrous carbuncles.
As a Grenadian, it makes me proud when people tell me how beautiful my island is. And not just physical beauty, Grenada has a rich historical heritage, reflected in its iconic Georgian architecture, along with more recent touches that are inherently Grenadian. Not so these carbuncles: Chinese designed mega-hotels which have absolutely nothing in common with their host environment. A host environment that is rapidly being attacked by these same projects. At the beautiful Levera Beach, a swathe of land has been clear cut, and ugly living quarters constructed, for the expected influx of Chinese workers. Further down the coast a beautiful wetlands habitat, La Sagesse (Wisdom), has been utterly destroyed, clear-cut by another developer. And at Mount Hartman, over several years several mega-hotel developments have all stalled, leaving nothing behind but scars in the earth. Repeat: this is a National Park. These projects are the centrepieces of the government’s “tourism-led recovery” strategy.
Tourism-led recovery? In my opinion, tourism will be the last sector of the economy to fully recover – if ever. And it certainly won’t recover through the kinds of mass-market, bargain-basement tourism that the government is currently promoting. The average visitor to Grenada is: (a) older; (b) more affluent; and (c) more discerning than the normal tourist; they come to Grenada, precisely because it’s not a mass-market destination, and doesn’t have the kinds of abominations pictured above.
Haven’t we learned anything at all? Are we still trotting out these same old, failed strategies? That bigger equals better? Every person on the planet is gun-shy about getting on a plane, a shyness that will last for years – particularly among Grenada’s tourist demographic: middle-aged and above. In the post-Covid world (whenever that may be), air travel will become: (a) less competitive; (b) longer queues; and (c) more expensive. It’s not pleasant, spending an eight-hour overnight flight wearing a mask, especially when Southern Europe is just a short hop away (and Spanish beaches are just as nice as ours, believe me).
In addition to being unpleasant, travel will also become more expensive. With the certain failure of many of the world’s airlines, those left standing will be more able to dictate prices, as they used to in the bad old days before liberalization. In aviation, social distancing is expensive: who do you think will pay for that empty seat next to you? You will. Another factor is travel insurance: middle-aged tourists will think long and hard before travelling anywhere without cover, and in the post-Covid world, premiums will become a lot more expensive.
And in the midst of this global pandemonium, this is when we decide to promote mass-market tourism? Do the math: it doesn’t compute.
Not only doesn’t it compute, it’s not even doable. Grenada is a tiny island, 23 miles from stem to stern, there’s no capacity to absorb a billion-dollar project, let alone two. Yet our Prime Minister assures us: “The initial stages of work on the $300 million hotel project by Range Developments in St David and the over $1 billion Grenada National Resort Project in St Patrick are now underway.” Do these “initial stages of work” include anything more than destroying the previously pristine environment? In return for destroying our natural habitats, how many Grenadians have been employed on these billion-dollar projects? More to the point: are these the type of tourism development that Grenada needs?
All my life I’ve worked in finance, I’m the archetypal numbers nerd. I would love to see the feasibility studies for these projects! How many hotel rooms would a billion dollars build? Two billion? Three? How many new tourists would need to visit Grenada, paying what rate, to make a billion-dollar hotel profitable? How many Grenadians would it employ? We may not know the answer to the first two questions, but we certainly know the third: not many. Chinese businesses abroad have a proven record of hiring predominantly Chinese workers. The only locals hired on previous Chinese-funded projects in Grenada have been a handful of janitors and security guards. Where will we find the thousands of trained hotel staff to work in these Chinese mega-hotels? Don’t be silly: China.
In Grenada, you can’t get further from the airport than Levera Beach: via a long, potholed, narrow and very winding road. Are we going to build a new high-speed highway, to whisk these thousands of new visitors to the previously pristine beaches of Northern Grenada? Water, electricity, sewerage and solid waste disposal: Grenada can’t even provide sufficient infrastructure for its own citizens, how will we provide for these billion-dollar projects?
What is particularly depressing about these mega-projects, is the total lack of any effective environmental oversight. My good friend the irrepressible Dr Hazel DaBreo is leading the charge to get some answers on the La Sagesse debacle, where the developers ignored their own Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and clear-cut hundreds of acres of mangroves, in one of Grenada’s most diverse natural habitats. The Chinese projects do not even have this minimal level of environmental screening – they just move in with the bulldozers.
Covid-19 has been a harsh lesson in reality: that our over-reliance on a fickle industry like tourism is a double-edged sword. And to use the vernacular: we just get a hard lash, with the backside of the machete! But do we learn? Evidently not, because in response to the pandemic that has exposed the fragility of tourism, what do we do? Rely on tourism even more! Isn’t it clear to any rational person, that we need a change of direction?
Naturally, tourism must play a central role in the regeneration of the Grenadian economy, but the crucial question is: What kind of tourism? You can’t fit square pegs into round holes; a country’s tourism strategy has to gel with its natural and human attributes. There are 2 distinct types of destination: mass-market tourism; and niche tourism; and Grenada sits squarely in the niche category. Our biggest hotel only has about 250 rooms, tiny by mass-market standards. During a recession, it is often the smaller, more upmarket hotels that are better able to weather the storm; as their clientele tends to be more well-heeled than the mass-market segment.
My contention is simple: These are the wrong hotels, for the wrong market, at the wrong time, on the wrong island. Apart from destroying the environment, bad design, and wrong locations; what else do these mega-projects all have in common? Their financing. None of them is backed by the traditional deep-pocketed “foreign investor”: a single entity or consortium that put their money where their mouth is and invests millions to make their dreams a reality. All these projects are predicated on the sale of one thing: Grenadian passports.
But that’s another story – altogether!
Watch out for Part 2 – Island for Sale: Grenada
Most of all chinese . They have no.respect for human and human rights not even animals . When and if they comes they speak they own language associate with their own . They are a racist athesist people . The government gave them our best lands because they wants it they even wanted our reserved forest If anyone gping destroy Grenafa is the chinese .
This is an amazing article, and sad in so many ways. The current government who has been in power far to long without opposition is destroying this beautiful island. I have been coming here from Canada since 2003, and have supported the local economy by staying in local hotels, eating in local restaurants, and buying local products.
The Grenadian people are fed up with this government and their addiction to selling passports, and getting kickbacks from these huge soul-destroying mega projects.
Grenadians need to rise up, and show this dictatorship government they will no longer alliw their country to be destroyed.
Your second paragraph—-The Grenadian people are fed up with this Government—– These are the people that are re-electing said Government over and over again. I don’t think the people care. Sad!
Not entirely true. The droves and masses that you see in election campaigns are the ones depending on the government for the handout, the imani work, the travo. They keep voting time and time again without opening their eyes. The out number the ones with their thinking caps on. If you listen to people on the street… “I like my PM, he could talk and dance” imagine that being a reason to vote for a PM. People vote “party”. Look at the NE constituency. The elected representative did nothing during his first win and they still voted for him the 2nd time. Not because they thought he would help them or the country… they just want green to win. These people get blinded with promises for road work, and new road I their villages. They vote for the shallow things but the real crux of the matters falls by the way for them.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Sad, but too true..Quality over quantity everytime.
We have been visiting Grenada for years and it has always been our favourite island in the whole Caribbean. We come for long periods and we don’t stay in the all-inclusive hotels. We spend our time in unspoilt parts of the island such as Levera and La Sagesse. We buy and eat locally and love the local people and the lack of persistent vendors. HOWEVER the last couple of years have seen an erosion of the very things we come to Grenada for and we are sad to see major developments that involve the destruction of local habitats. Please fight back Grenadians – you have something very unique and special. Don’t just become another mass tourist destination.
Having read Mr S B Samuel’s article, ”Grenada Tourism : Why are we killing the goose’ (25/8/2020) it sheds light on where we stand as a nation.
I have heard -and I do not believe that for one moment – we have a dictatorship government. Now I understand the helplessness that people feel.
We are in the position where the majority of people are unhappy with the government’s actions on this very important issue, they appear not to listen to the concerns of its people and steam rolling ahead with its plans. We have no effective opposition to argue our case. The government is taking this lack of opposition as a LICENCE to do as it pleases.
Is there no other way to encourage employment? How about investing, developing and encouraging agricultural and farming skills by providing the equipment, education and finances. That’s what we should ask China for. That way we keep our beautiful beaches without further destruction to our landscape. We gain nothing by destroying what we HAVE in the hope of getting what we WANT. The key is to keep what we have and work to develop what we need.
We fear there is no turning back for our country if these destructive actions continue in the name of progress. For whom ?
I couldn’t have written a clearer article. I am seeing my beautiful island being destroyed by Chinese investment. It’s time we do something to prevent further damage to Grenada.
A well thought out assessment of the current situation on my beautiful homeland. Thank you! I visited last year and saw some of the sites. The short-sighted Govt. still cannot see that Livera needs to be left alone. The roads that site is narrow and in terrible need of repair. As far as I am concerned, the over development in Grand Anse, have destroyed the beauty of the beach. Please leave the beautiful vegetation so that my grand children can enjoy some of what I enjoyed as a child.
We gained independence from Britain some years ago, now we are allowing the Chinese to colonise us. Does that make any sense? China is working hard to take over the caribbean islands. Please, don’t let that happen — look at what is happening in Hong Kong..After the Chinese have invested their money, Grenadians will no longer have free access to those beaches. The government will have little say as they will be unable to repay the Chinese their investment. Chinese money will control Grenada and Grenadians. Stand and fight for your freedom, Chinese are dictators.
Mr. Samuel, thank you for this incredibly insightful piece. I recall as a youth, when Mr. Mitchell at the time was in his first term as Prime Minister said on the radio “We (as in Grenada) do not want to become a floating cruising ship like Barbados”, and this was around 1995/96. But here we are… What I cannot for the life of me understand how tourism is supposedly providing significant jobs; when we all know how low value these jobs are. They pay locals just enough to get home, eat something and return to work the next day. Nothing substantial, that can help propel people out of their circumstance(s). Covid-19 is a perfect example of how relying on visitors alone will cripple your economy.
Also, Mr. Samuel is 100% on the money in regard to us being better marketed as a “hidden gem” vs mass market tourism. We do not have the infrastructure nor capacity to truly contend with mass market visitors. I love knowing my country is developing at a doable pace. Not transforming into a soul sucking playground only good for visitors to experience, further ingraining the idea our beautiful islands are only meant to “service”. These older politicians need to be rooted out. Alas, we’re about to be victim to global gentrification.
Tourism, as encouraged by the current government is putting the island on a death spiral. After Leverage and La Sagesse where next, and by whom. Wake up Grenadians.
A good article by Brian. Perhaps he should have first read my paper “Beyond Tourism” which exposes the farcical nature of tourism sector development. I wrote that paper at least five years ago.