St. Lucia Simply Beautiful

Construction About To Start On Marina Village

The old Moorings buildings will be demolished early in March to make way for the new Marigot Marina Village. This colourful, Caribbean style wooden village designed By the Barbados based architects; Gillespie Steel, will be built around a central courtyard featuring a European style supermarket and wine shop and banking and internet facilities. There will also be a bakery, a nautical restaurant and bar, boutiques and an art gallery and craft shop.

What’s Happening On Site

The weather has been good and progress on site has been excellent, as you can see from the photographs. The resort is clearly taking shape and the structure of many of the apartments is almost complete. The roof shingles and external woodwork are being added and inside, the beautiful natural wood and slate floors are being laid down.

Sonesta

Of course, the news that everyone’s been waiting for is the 10 year Management Contract which was signed in February between Doubloon International Ltd and Sonesta International Hotels Corporation.
Sonesta is known primarily for its high levels of service, guest and staff relations, cuisine and art. They have endorsed our contemporary style for Discovery. We believe that Sonesta are likely to achieve for Discovery the highest possible level of guest service and satisfaction of any hotel in St Lucia. We are giving them the location and the quality of facility – which combined with their skills – will turn Marigot Bay into one of the finest destinations in the Caribbean.
Some of the top people from Sonesta have been visiting us over the past few months and they have all fallen in love with Marigot; as Sonesta’s CEO and President, Stephanie Sonnabend, said, “Discovery is a spectacular property”.

Sonesta have been in the hotel business since the 1940s and have built their reputation by offering uncompromising personal service, reflecting the culture and history of their locations and providing a memorable experience unique to each hotel. Based in Boston, they currently represent a collection of 26 upscale hotels and resorts and three Nile Cruise ships and they have operated hotels in the Caribbean for over 40 years—including Anguilla, Aruba, Bahamas, Bermuda, Bonaire, Curacao and St Maarten. They also have considerable expertise in the business of running apartment hotels, including the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort and the Sonesta Hotel and Suites in Coconut Grove, Miami. They have new apartment hotels under construction in Orlando and planned for Key Biscayne, Florida.

Impressively, Sonesta have already set to work, making sure that they are up to speed and have all the necessary systems in place for Discovery’s opening at the end of the year. Briefing sessions are being held with their design and operations teams and their PR and Marketing division has incorporated Discovery into its portfolio for a Hotel Exhibition in Europe at the end of February.

To see Sonesta’s beautiful resorts and find out more about their focus on fine food and their attention to detail when it comes to looking after their guests, visit Sonesta’s website at http://www.sonesta.com.

Life In The Bay

The festive season was lively; the Christmas Regatta on 22nd December brought both local yachts and ARC boats racing down from Rodney Bay to party at Marigot overnight, followed by a special breakfast at the Rainforest Hideaway restaurant next day. Many of the boats stayed to celebrate Christmas and watch the spectacular Marigot fireworks display on New Year’s Eve. As one local bar owner said, “it feels like the bay is coming back to life at last.”

The boats come back to the bay

And ever since then the bay has continued to be busy. Our hard work on the PR front, particularly at the Antigua yacht regattas has been bringing in some of the biggest and most beautiful yachts in the world. For many years, these boats with their wealthy guests aboard had stopped coming to Marigot, but that is changing. Georgia (one of the world’s biggest sloops) spent a couple of days on the dock, as did the famous Perini yacht, Andromeda La Dea and huge motor yachts such as Altitude, Hilarion and Tatasu.

Marigot is a very deep natural harbour and can accommodate superyachts gside the dock. The fact that it is also a Hurricane Hole (a safe haven in a storm) will also make it attractive during the summer season.

Portrait Of St Lucia

Our exhibition of photographs by Gered Mankowitz of 52 portraits of prominent St Lucians, all in their special locations around the island, was premiered with a great deal of successful publicity in November 20004. It has aroused a lot of press interest in St Lucia and the Discovery development in particular. The Tourist Board are taking it to North America prior to its first- time showing in St Lucia as part of Discovery’s own launch celebrations. Being partly sponsored by Discovery it has proved to be a very effective way of publicising our spa hotel and marina village,

Molly McDaniel and I have been working hard over the past two years, not only on the exhibition but on a number of marketing initiatives, targeting the luxury yacht market, getting into the relevant travel guides, talking to the top travel journalists and generally getting the Discovery name ‘out there’. It’s great news for us that we will be getting a whole new team to help with this and we are very excited about working with Sonesta’s very experienced PR and Marketing department to ensure that Discovery quickly establishes a prominent position in the Caribbean Luxury travel market.

Interior Design Sneak Preview

It took a while to get the Pink Snail bar to look quite as funky and amazing as we wanted, but I think you’ll agree, it’s a real show stopper. Getting the pink resin bar top and the pink etched glass frontage designed and ready to deliver was a challenge, but in the end we achieved just the look we wanted. The natural slate floor, Sharon Marston lighting and Philippe Starke Ghost chairs complete the cool contemporary image and guarantee us coverage in the style magazines.

Coming next
In your next Newsletter we should be sending you pictures of some finished hotel rooms, complete with lighting – so watch this space!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 12:00 PM and is filed under Press Release. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.