If it comes to pass, Wednes­day’s an­nounce­ment by busi­ness­man John Aboud, that he is pre­pared to of­fer a stake in the pro­posed Rocky Point prop­er­ty de­vel­op­ment in To­ba­go, to To­bag­o­ni­ans, has the po­ten­tial to rev­o­lu­tionise the par­a­digm of ho­tel own­er­ship in the re­gion.

Dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion at a meet­ing called to dis­cuss the project, Mr Aboud float­ed the idea of sell­ing one or two shares of the 15 avail­able in the de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny to To­bag­o­ni­ans, ei­ther to com­mu­ni­ties close to Rocky Point or to a group of To­ba­go busi­ness­peo­ple.

One share out of 15 would be 6.66 per cent of the project, while two shares would be 13.33 per cent.

His lack of cer­tain­ty about the num­ber of shares to be of­fered, he said, is be­cause he would need to gauge To­bag­o­ni­ans’ ap­petite to the idea of share own­er­ship in the project, which in­cludes a Mar­riott-brand­ed ho­tel, vil­las and town­hous­es. He al­so said the project would need to re­ceive all of its reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval—the most im­por­tant of which would be the green light from the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty—be­fore the project’s scale and cost could be quan­ti­fied.

Speak­ing about the cost of the shares, he told the meet­ing fur­ther de­tails would need to wait un­til they have a busi­ness plan and every­thing, in­clud­ing all ap­provals, is com­plete.

To­ba­go’s most re­cent in­volve­ment with a pro­posed, tourism-fo­cused ho­tel was with the abort­ed San­dals de­vel­op­ment in Buc­coo. 

The cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ini­tial dis­cus­sions with Gor­don ‘Butch’ Stew­art, the late chair­man of San­dals, cen­tred around the Gov­ern­ment own­ing the ho­tels, a San­dals and a Breezes, un­der­tak­ing their con­struc­tion and then hand­ing the man­age­ment of the ho­tels over to the Ja­maican fam­i­ly-owned com­pa­ny. 

This is the mod­el that has been used with the Hilton Trinidad, which opened 62 years ago, and the Hy­att Re­gency, which ac­cept­ed its first guests 16 years ago. The Hy­att/Hilton mod­el in T&T in­volves the Gov­ern­ment as the own­er and the in­vestor as the man­ag­er.

Mr Aboud’s pro­pos­al en­vis­ages di­rect own­er­ship in the de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny by To­bag­o­ni­ans at an ear­ly stage, which has the clear ben­e­fit of gen­er­at­ing buy-in from the com­mu­ni­ty.

As Sec­re­tary for Tourism in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Tashia Bur­ris put it on Wednes­day, “I think if To­bag­o­ni­ans get an op­por­tu­ni­ty to lit­er­al­ly own a stake in this project, they will be­come cham­pi­ons of the project, they will fo­cus more on the pos­i­tives and try to see if they can as­sist in mit­i­gat­ing some of the neg­a­tives, be­cause every project has its pros and cons.”

If To­bag­on­ian in­di­vid­u­als or com­mu­ni­ties be­come share­hold­ers in the Rocky Point de­vel­op­ment, they would have a vest­ed, fi­nan­cial in­ter­est in en­sur­ing the project’s suc­cess, which would ben­e­fit every­one—the de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny, its To­ba­go in­vestors, the Gov­ern­ment and even the per­ma­nent em­ploy­ees of the ho­tel, who could al­so be part of the own­er­ship arrange­ment. If the em­ploy­ees and the fence-line com­mu­ni­ties par­tic­i­pate in the own­er­ship of the project, that may al­so have a trick­le-down im­pact on how the guests at the ho­tel are treat­ed. 

The Aboud pro­pos­al ap­pears, on its face, to in­clude the com­mu­ni­ties im­pact­ed by the de­vel­op­ment of ho­tels, and may be one that all tourism-ori­ent­ed coun­tries in the re­gion should em­u­late.