Life's a beach

01 January 2000
Life's a beach

LaSource

Pink Gin Beach, PO Box 852, St George's Grenada, West Indies

Rooms: 100

Occupancy: 76%

Projected turnover 1999-2000: £5.2m

Staff turnover: 13.5%

I get up about 7am to face yet another day in paradise. It does rain of course, but normally just short, sharp showers. Most days are full of glorious sunshine and endless blue skies. I don't miss the grey skies of England. It takes me about 25 minutes to get to work. Grenada is small, 21 miles long by 12 miles wide, but the roads are bad. There's one traffic light on the island and because the roads are constantly being repaired there are often traffic jams.

I get to work at about 8am and, after several cups of coffee, meet with my heads of department. The hurricane season starts next month so we're running through our emergency procedures. I'm not too worried about this as the last hurricane to hit Grenada was in 1955. Still, we have to plan for all eventualities.

LaSource is on the beach. If a hurricane were to hit the island the sea level would rise and probably flood the ground floor of the hotel. All the outdoor furniture would get thrown in the swimming pool so it wouldn't fly around. Windows would be barred up and we would have an operations centre in the first-floor restaurant.I suspect that staff would try to come to work as the hotel would be a lot safer than some of the ramshackle huts in which they live.

Around 11am I meet with Bernard Antoine, our personnel manager. We're a unionised hotel and this constantly throws up problems. Staff work an 80-hour fortnight with three days off within that time. On top of this they are entitled to nine days' sick leave a year - most of them see this as extra holiday and take it. It makes doing rotas a nightmare.

We try to encourage healthy competition among staff through a quality system. Guests fill in questionnaires in which they have to rate different departments as excellent, good, fair and poor. Excellent gets 100%, good 75%, fair 25% and poor zero. This isconverted to an overall percentage thatallows us to track performance of individual departments. Each department aims to achieve 89%.

Lunch is always a buffet from 12.30pm until 2pm. Our chef, Chris Stephens, is from New Zealand but he has also worked in China. The best day is Friday when there's a fabulous oriental spread including sushi and dim sum. Guests can and do eat as much as they want. Running a successful all-inclusive operation comes down to effective cost control. Allowances for food and drink are not as high as might be expected - £2 per person per day on drinks for example. We achieve this by using local spirits wherever possible. Also a lot of guests don't drink alcohol during the day as it's too hot and just have wine with dinner.

During the afternoon in between phone calls and paperwork I might wander over to Oasis, our treatment centre. We're not a health farm nor a spa. People do come here for the relaxation experience but they're not health junkies. They're usually stressed out and need a holiday in the sun coupled with some form of pampering. One treatment a day is included in the room price.

I eat in the hotel three evenings a week, often with travel agents who are over on familiarisation trips. We do a lot of marketing this way. My business objectives are to raise rates, [currently US$190 (£118) per person per night from the American market and US$160 (£99) from the UK] and to boost occupancy from 76% to 80-85% on a year-round basis. Business entertaining is a good way of promoting the product. The biggest referral is from word of mouth [29%] followed by travel brochures [25%] and travel agent recommendation [19.9%].

There's not much to do in the evening, no night clubs nor lively bars. But there are other Brits such as Atif [Dar] our holistic instructor and Graham [Sen] our sous chef if I feel in need of conversations about home. I'm not particularly homesick. I like the peace and tranquillity of the island although a decent pint of beer from time to time wouldn't go amiss. n

See Caterer June 17 for a full report on working in Grenada

Norf

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