Afra Raymond made a presentation at the 4th Caribbean International Tourism Conference at UWI’s Cave Hill Campus in Barbados on Trinidad & Tobago’s State-owned hotels to outline the results and provisional conclusions of his research examining the existing State-owned hotels as a way of understanding the real prospects for the large-scale Tobago Sandals proposed by the incumbent government in 2015.
‘Manufactured consent’ is supported by “…effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion…“.
—Noam Chomsky
This article is based on notes for my presentation today to the Fourth Caribbean International Tourism Conference (CITC 2019) at UWI’s Cave Hill campus. My presentation will be on Trinidad & Tobago’s State-owned hotels to outline the results and provisional conclusions of my research. I designed that research program to examine the existing State-owned hotels as a way of understanding the real prospects for the large-scale Tobago Sandals being proposed by the current government in 2015.
I am questioning the role of our responsible elites in light of Dr Terrence Farrell’s ‘Where do we go from here‘ speech to the Queen’s Park Cricket Club on 22 November 2019. Dr Farrell also chaired a THA-appointed Committee to recommend a Medium-Term Policy and Planning Framework for Tobago. Those proposals were made on 12 November 2019 and included three new all-inclusive hotels for Tobago adding about 1,800 new rooms. Continue reading “Property Matters – State owned hotels”
Afra Raymond talks on:
during this panel discussion: ‘Resort Development in Tobago: Power, Politics & People’ organized by Department of Management Studies of the University of the West Indies.
Programme Date: Wednesday 22nd May, 2019
Programme Length: 00:16:43
On 2 February 2018, the Ministry of Tourism announced its upcoming symposium – ‘Digital Transformation within the Tourism Sector‘ – as a major event on Friday 23 February 2018, in conjunction with Massy Technologies and featuring speakers from Microsoft and IBM.
This is an ambitious project intended to examine big-data, the cloud, the digital customer experience and the prospects of the hospitality industry in our country. As such, these proposals should have our principled support, but there is real cause for a pause here, given the distinct reluctance of the State’s agencies to answer our queries on the agreements and performance of the large State-owned hotels.
The three largest hotels in our country are State-owned – Trinidad Hilton; Magdalena Grand (formerly known as Tobago Hilton) and Hyatt Regency – comprising about 45% of the established hotel rooms, at the better end of the market. The amount of Public Money invested via capital outlay in those hotels is estimated, from the public record, in the first sidebar. But what is of deeper interest to me is that far larger sums of money are generated in the operations of those hotels than the capital spent to create the actual facilities. Those sums are spent on rooms, meals, drinks, rentals for functions and so on.
We almost never get any real open discussion on the actual revenues of these hotels or the arrangements for sharing those monies between the State as property owner and the hotel operator. Continue reading “Property Matters – Digital Transformation in our Tourism?”
This is our Hotel Facts Seminar held at The UWI’s Noor Hassanali Auditorium on Thursday 9th November 2017 featuring Afra Raymond, David Walker and Rishi Maharaj of Disclosure Today.
We would like to thank Professor Rose-Marie Belle-Antoine, Dean of the Law Faculty, for her support, without which we would have been unable to convene this seminar. We also thank Rhoda Bharath of #newsauce and The Eternal Pantomime for being our MC/Moderator at such short notice. Video courtesy PixelPlay Media.
I have written extensively on the surfeit of maladies plaguing our governance. Now, I will be joining some of my most esteemed colleagues in a discussion around the Hotel Facts that are in desperate need of uncovering.
We have undertaken the monumental task of becoming archeologists for truth, and we are honoured to host a public discussion to put our artifacts on display.
We welcome everyone who shares a vested interest in truth discovery to join us at our Hotel Facts Seminar on Thursday at 6:00 PM in the Noor Hassanali Auditorium, The UWI, St Augustine. (The Noor Hassanali Auditorium is housed on the same site as the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES, see map below), on the western side of the main Campus of the UWI, St Augustine, adjacent to, and north of, the Institute of International Relations.)
Speakers
Afra Raymond
Rishi Maharaj CEO of Disclosure Today
David Walker
Moderator – Rhoda Bharath of The UWI’s Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics
Date: Thursday, 9 November, 2017
Time: 6:00 PM
Admission: FREE!
AfraRaymond.net 