By Annelia Nixon

anixon@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas is experiencing a room shortage, according to Darin Woods, Bahamas Hotel Catering & Allied Workers Union, who expressed his joy that Baha Mar will build a new luxury resort where the former Melia hotel once stood.

“I mean, as far as we concerned, first of all, we don’t represent the persons out there, but when you look at, from a country standpoint, we welcome any expansion of rooms because we recognizse that we are shortlisted in terms of our inventory of rooms because, of course, we would have lost the Melia hotel, we would have lost the Wyndham hotel and so anything that brings a replacement to the rooms that we would have lost is welcome news to us because we know the other day we had some rooms booked in here and we actually didn’t have enough rooms. So anything that replaces the rooms is welcome news.”

This comes after comments from former Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar who said Atlantis has 600 rooms sitting vacant that he believes should be brought “back online”. He added: “Well, you know, the revenue from tourism is a function of number of rooms multiplied by what people spend on the room and so the room rates have definitely gone up. The number of rooms have probably remained flat if trended down a little bit with the demolition of a number of hotels, the one at Baha Mar, the closure of 600 rooms at Atlantis, the Hilton have been closed. So those rooms are hopefully coming back on stream but if you don’t have the rooms you can’t earn the revenue result of that, the comment probably was that we were not getting what we could get if we bought those rooms back on screen and so they’re slowly coming back on stream. You know, the Hilton’s back on stream now and Baha Mar announced that they’re building a replacement for the Melia and we’ve heard nothing about what’s happening over at Atlantis with their 600 or so rooms.”

Mr Woods also said Baha Mar is not part of the union, but he hopes the new resort will be just like Melia was. He added that he would like to adopt every hotel into his union but it’s a process.

“What I mean, of course, is the process in terms of going through to get recognition where the employees have to express an interest and the union have to then write to the company expressing that they have employees as members of the union, and then they either reject or accept it,” he said.

He spoke on why Baha Mar is not part of the union: “One thing we know, we don’t have the numbers that is required to have them so we got to continue working until that happens. That’s because they’re not members. We need 50 plus one, and we don’t have that number and of course, like anything else, employees have to express an interest in that, you know?”