THE EDITOR: Cruise ship passenger arrival figures are no barometer of a tourism sector's health. Passengers disembarking (from ocean-going liners or from the inter-island ferry) at Scarborough are greeted with a 21st century urban slumscape, complete with American fast food chain outlets, derelict, abandoned three-storey buildings (of dubious purpose from their very beginnings), chunks of concrete sprouting rusty re-rods, the delightful prospect of a constant stream of vehicles on Carrington Street, Milford Road and, for the brave visitor trying to get to the sad golf course lawn that passes for a Botanic Garden, more traffic on Gardenside Road.
The latest additions to this urban slumscape are grey metal rubbish bins perched on grey metal poles. A great idea left to its own devices? Apparently, as these ugly bins are surrounded with plastic bottles and fast food boxes that have no hope of actually being disposed of within.
Is it just as well to toss unwanted objects in the slimy, open gutters of Scarborough or is it philosophically better to toss them toward a pile of similar rubbish surrounding an illusional solution to a problem?
There is no way in the world that the thousands of visitors to Tobago during the 2024 cruise ship season recommended to anyone that Tobago would be a choice for their holiday. No friends or family heard that. Word-of-mouth promotion of Tobago as a holiday destination cannot be entertained as an offshoot of the cruise industry. No way.
This is not the explanation, of course, for the empty hotels in Tobago. Many factors contribute to that incontrovertible fact. Thus, mystery swirls around and threatens to suffocate the proposal to build an upmarket housing estate at Rocky Point, disguised as a hotel resort. What can we say about this mortar of a hotel? That there is more in it than a pestle of a hotel?
The Superior Hotels company, if seriously interested in operating a hotel business in Tobago, would be investing its money and time in one of the empty ones. They are sadly available to prospective investors on the Caribbean or the Atlantic coasts.
Gary Voss wrote recently in the dailies about investment opportunities that flourish locally.
A BLADE
via e-mail
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