Finance minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Camillo Gonsalves assured a high-level Sandals Resorts International (SRI) team that all is going well with the Sandals hotel under construction at Buccament Bay, saying it would be second to none.

“We are very pleased with where we are,” Gonsalves, the son of Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, told the 10-member SRI team led by Executive Chairman Adam Stewart, after taking them on tour of the property where the 303-room resort is rapidly taking shape.

PM Gonsalves, who had doggedly pursued the Stewart family to bring their leading Caribbean resort chain to his island, briefly stopped by.

Sandals St Vincent will make the picturesque multi-island nation the ninth in the growing Sandals chain that the finance minister said would, in short order, become the largest private employer of labour there.

He said just under 725 people were currently employed on the hotel site, 60 per cent of them from St Vincent and the remaining 40 per cent from overseas, with a sizeable number from Jamaica.

Gonsalves, in his update, noted that commercial airlines had indicated that they would be increasing their seat capacity to the island. At the same time, tour operators and promotional entities, including game shows from the United States, had been calling wanting to know when the resort would be opened.

Executive Chairman Stewart confidently predicted that the resort, when finished, would be “one of the most extraordinary hotels ever developed in the Caribbean and would significantly impact the island’s economy”.

Among those accompanying Stewart were Chief Executive Officer Gebhard Rainer; Chief Administrative Officer Jordan Samuda; Chief Operating Officer Shawn Dacosta; managing director for St Lucia, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, Winston Anderson; group director of technical services Eugene Stall.

Making his first visit to St Vincent, Gary Sadler, executive vice-president of sales and industry relations for Miami-based Unique Vacations, affiliate of the worldwide representatives of Sandals and Beaches Resorts, said he was excited about the prospects for the hotel.

Sadler said he had immediately fallen in love with the location, telling local news outlet Searchlight that it was “just an amazing, amazing destination… For me, whatever I saw in the brochures, whatever I saw in the pictures, it is even more certainly. Being on site is just absolutely fantastic”.

“…Every destination is unique, but St Vincent’s Sandals’ location is phenomenal. When I think about all the islands in which Sandals operates in the Caribbean, you will never find a destination in a valley with two beautiful mountains…”

Sadler said St Vincent was virtually virgin territory for tourism and would be especially attractive to tourists who are “looking for something that is just quaint, that is just different, that is just picturesque, and that is what I believe St Vincent has to offer right now”.

He added that sellers were raring to go for an opportunity to start selling the destination, which is expected to open next year.