One of the pillars of Barbados Future, as opposed to Barbados Present, has undoubtedly been the “Coming of the Four Seasons.”

The luxury residential-cum-hotel project, from inception, has unfortunately become almost synonymous with the economic model seen as the way forward for the island.

Unfortunate, and also, I can now say with hindsight, misguided. To badly paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, we are looking to the future through our rear view mirror.  

In concept, Four Seasons is essentially a throwback to the golden era of the Arthur administration, which may be why we so readily swallowed its marketing hook, line, etc. 

Rich people buying villas on the beach - their own private Sandy Lanes, as I believe many of them saw it (and as Michael Winner intimated in a column a year or two ago). This villa community would then create a small but ever-present demand for a top-class hotel to house their friends and family if they were too many at one time to be accommodate chez villa; hence the small, 100-room Four Seasons. Note the company which owns that brand has not put cent one into the project (it never does).

To continue with the dream, apart from continuing to embellish the idea of Barbados as the place where the Simon Cowells don’t just visit but also own property, the project would provide lots of construction work for a good few years and then a steady demand for the high end of consumer products which only the rich can afford.

Of course, it all fell apart long ago, but we didn’t want to believe it. The original investors had a great falling out with the original developers and the building of the first few villas stalled. You can see their unfinished hulks looming over the ugly blue plywood fence running uninvitingly all along Paradise Beach.

We did not want to believe the dream was over, that this attempt to light a fire once more under the sand of the west coast and by some strange alchemy turn it into gold had fizzled, perhaps forever.

In debt and with the old model broken, Four Seasons needed a Hail Mary pass, and seemed to get it from the Barbados government, which guaranteed a US$60 million loan (added to our already over-burdened national debt) undertaken by Four Seasons project to pay off the Royal Bank of Scotland and the very unhappy local trade which had done work and remained out-of-pocket. Small, hard-working local entrepreneurs like Bizzy Williams stood in line all morning to get their checks. 

But the attempt to light that old fire fizzled again. It was based on the hope that the rich people who were unhappy with the former developers but still wanted their villas would gain confidence in the project and return, plus hopefully passing the word. After all, there were only about three dozen villas available and some were already sold.

But the old embers did not light, and last May the project abruptly changed direction. Faced with recalcitrant or non-existent purchasers it was decided to put the selling of villas into Phase Two and bring up the building of the hotel into Phase One. 

Now we are told it is going to take a longer than expected time for the Inter-American Development Bank to decide if it will approve a loan of over $100 million (I forget which currency - does it matter?) and so even if all goes well the hotel would not come on stream for a few more years.

Let me ask you this, and I am no developer, so go ahead and shout me down if you like: if you were going to build a small hotel as a back-up to your major villa project, but then you decide to make the hotel the first priority without the villas there to provide business directly and indirectly for it, how can you proceed with the same concept for the hotel?

We already have a boutique hotel on the west coast, you say, so why not two? Well, my friends, I’m here to tell you that there are at least two main differences between Sandy Lane and Four Seasons. 

The former has private investors with lots of money. I need to repeat the phrase lots of money. I mean parking lots.

Secondly, Sandy Lane does not reside on a hillside only, it owns half of St. James, all up to Highway 2A. 

Four Seasons Barbados, by sad contrast, has moved from a model of being financed by the world’s richest people as their private Caribbean sandbox to hopefully being financed by a development bank, one ironically more associated with funding irrigation pipelines to rural areas and infrastructure to urban centers in Latin America.

Why the IADB would even consider Four Seasons Barbados is beyond me, but the fact that this is the bank on which the project’s future currently hangs brings the needed reality check to our long-standing tourism conceit, that we are the island where the rich will always purchase their own private homes.

Can you not sense that the world tourism market has moved on and, as long as we continue to see this as our way forward, we are yesterday’s men and women in yesterday’s country?

ends