TT to get 124-room Marriott Hotel

Trinidad and Tobago is to get a new $150 million new Marriott Courtyard Hotel and Office Building, a foreign investment which Prime Minister Patrick Manning said is a vote of confidence in the country’s economy at a time of global uncertainty.

He was giving the feature address at the sod-turning ceremony yesterday at the Invaders Bay, Mucurapo, site. The project is a joint venture between Marriott International Inc and Caribe Hospitality of Trinidad and Tobago.  Manning said: “It is indeed significant that at a time when the future of tourism and the hotel industry is uncertain the world over — at a time when there is a slowing down of related activities in Europe, North America, South America and even parts of the Caribbean —  it is indeed significant that you have chosen to set up shop in Trinidad and Tobago”. He said the project would draw the country into the international hospitality mainstream, with positive effects on tourism, travel, vacation packages, internal cruises and local sight-seeing tours and showed the country had a bright future. Tourism, he noted, was no longer marginal in national development.   With an eye on the foreign visitor, Manning concluded: “As the Carnival season approaches let us comport ourselves in a manner befitting this great and promising nation”.

Christian Mouttet of local venture partners, Victor Mouttet, told guests that the hotel would have 124 rooms, meeting rooms, swimming pool and gymnasium, plus access to adjacent leisure facilities like Movie Towne.  The project would cost $150 million and would provide some 400 jobs at the peak of its construction, and then some 100 new permanent jobs. Mouttet said: “It is our intention to have guests staying at the hotel for Carnival 2004.” He told Newsday that the hotel was the third in a series of 10 similar Marriott Hotels in Latin America and the Caribbean.  He said that he expected high levels of room occupancy based upon current hotel occupancy rates, even without new projections based on the coming energy boom. He said the office would be constructed from May to September and the hotel from now to February 2004. As to ecological concerns about Invaders Bay, Mouttet said: “None of the land we are using is reclaimed land”.