Business

Avia Collinder, Business Writer

Thirteen years after it changed ownership, the now Hendrickson family-run Sunset Beach Resort and Spa, located on the tip of the Montego Freeport peninsula in Montego Bay, is yet to find the right conditions to expand the 430-room facility, a project in the making since the early 2000s. But, even as officials close to the property say the resort's current survival-mode operating status continues to scuttle the expansion plans there, its owners have gone on to acquire several other hotels in Kingston, Ocho Rios and Montego Bay itself, while a Spanish-led consortium has splashed out US$180 million to plunk the ritzy upmarket twin Secrets Resort less than a stone's throw away.

Trying to survive

"We are trying to survive like everyone else," Sunset Resort General Manager Glen Huntington said of the latest postponement of the plan to build a new 176-room block on 4.8 hectares north of the present property which houses two towers and 120 bungalows. The project was listed on the Jamaica Tourist Board's product development schedule in November 2009 as one of several local resort upgrading projects to bear fruit in 2010.

With occupancy at 60 per cent, no construction is currently being contemplated, Huntington told the Financial Gleaner. The property has undergone several upgrades, costing millions of dollars, since the Karl Hendrickson-headed family bought the 15-year-old Seawind hotel from the Government in 1997 for a reported $84 million. Plans for the new rooms were approved by the building permit authorities in 2002. At that time, the proposed expansion was projected to cost in excess of $1.1 billion.

The land on which the hotel sits is part of land reclaimed in the 1960s during the dredging and the construction of Montego's deep-water harbour. In its initial environmental impact assessment, the National Environment and Planning Agency had noted that detailed layout, drainage and sewerage plans for the proposed expansion works were to be adjusted before the construction phase began.

Neither a new timeline nor an updated price tag has been given for the expansion plans.

The hotel's director of corporate communications, Charmaine Deane, said a room upgrade for all Sunset-branded properties, including the 730-room Sunset Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios and the 65-room Sunset at the Palms in Negril, is on the cards for this year.

"What we are doing is retooling," she said.

The Hendricksons also own and operate the Holiday Inn hotel in Montego Bay, their latest accommodation acquisition; the Courtleigh and Knutsford hotels in Kingston; Coconut Bay in Saint Lucia, and The Ruins at the Falls restaurant in Ocho Rios.

Just months ago, Seawind Key Investments, a partnership between the Spanish Fuerte group and the American-based AM Resorts, with the help of a US80 million loan from Jamaica's National Commercial Bank, opened two 350- room adults-only resorts - Secrets Wild Orchid and Secrets St James - next door to the Sunset resort.

When the Sunset Resort expansion was first contemplated, that property was the only major hotel in the Freeport area of Montego Bay, although other small condominiums and apartment complexes have been a feature of the area for years.

avia.collinder@gleanerjm.com