by Randy Gopaul
The recently announced plans for a lavish, 350-room hotel to be built along Guyana’s seawall have raised eyebrows, and rightly so. With a price tag of $350 million, this equates to an astounding $1 million per room. Contrast this to luxury hotels in established tourist hubs like Qatar, which achieve higher returns on more modest investments.
It makes little sense for Guyana, with a nascent tourism industry, to plunge into such an extravagant project. While the Qatari investors attached may be accustomed to far different realities back home, Guyana’s terrestrial attractions and readiness could hardly be more different.
Unlike Guyana, Qatar has actively built its tourism sector on the back of significant investments, including billions into museums, luxury shopping centers, parks, and hosting global events. Qatar Airways has helped shuttle tourists to gleaming new resorts and world-class attractions, from acclaimed art galleries to iconic architecture. Visitors soak up Qatar’s rich culture and history at UNESCO World Heritage sites and marketplaces teeming with local wares and cuisine.
In Guyana, tourists face underwhelming infrastructure ranging from potholed roadways to congested airports. Natural attractions remain largely inaccessible absent guiding services. Basic expectations around customer service, accommodation standards, and hospitality best practices go unmet.
While Qatar’s citizens and private sector have embraced tourism as an engine of economic growth and diversity, Guyanese have hardly been brought into – let alone prepared for – this supposed transformation.
The financial assumptions attached to Guyana’s proposed luxury lodgings are equally confounding in light of global industry benchmarks. Qatar’s hotels can bank on 85 percent occupancy rates given the high volumes of business and leisure travelers. The average revenue per guest of $600 is backed by legions of deep-pocketed visitors. Operational costs are minimized by readily accessible food supplies, utilities, and labor.
Saddled with a projected price tag of over $1 million per room, Guyana’s hotel would require staggering room rates and anomalous occupancy rates just to scrape a minimally acceptable return. Such economics risk leaving luxury lodgings financially underwater. More shocking is that taxpayers and oil revenues would end up shouldering part of the burden of these dubious investments and the government races to ensure the infrastructure is in place to accommodate such investments. All this while teachers and public servants are underpaid.
When reviewing where best to park precious investment capital, Qatar’s hospitality sector shines brightly compared to Guyana’s hallucinatory hotelscape. Even if Guyana can vastly upgrade its infrastructure and readiness over a compressed timeframe, such grand lodging ambitions are more likely to sink the country’s prospects than uplift them. Guyanese deserve far better stewardship of valuable resources than chasing impractical vanity projects. Let the government instead focus first on making the country more broadly inhabitable for citizens and tourists alike before indulging wild-eyed schemes profiting the few at the expense of the many.
