Pacific Magazine > Magazine > March 1, 2001

Tourism

Wanted: More Hotel Rooms

The Frustration Facing Five Countries

By Robert Keith-Reid

Vanuatu, Samoa, Cook Islands, Tonga and Fiji have a common frustration. All want more hotel rooms. All have difficulty persuading investors to build them in the numbers they think they need. At the beginning of 2000, after a decade of almost no investment in the 300-room resorts the Fiji Visitors Bureau and the national airline Air Pacific say are most needed, it looked as if a drought attributed to a 1987 army coup was breaking. About F$1000 million (US$450 million) of investment in four to five resorts was confidently expected. Then on May 19, the very day Air Pacific was to draw the first tranche of money for a 300-room resort, gunmen invaded Parliament. One British hotel group immediately killed a project for a 100-to-150 room hotel near Nadi. Air Pacific’s planned joint venture with Europe’s Accor group turned sour. Others became non-committal.

Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga can’t blame political unrest for the stagnancy of their hotel room portfolios. All three lie off main Pacific air trunk routes and are heavily reliant on small national airlines for the delivery of their relatively small numbers of visitors. The dilemma is what comes first: more flights or more new rooms?

Visitor bureau chief:Samoa's Hazelman

SAMOA:
Samoa’s Polynesian Airlines took the plunge last November, taking delivery of the first of two Boeing 737s able to fly visitors direct from Australia and Hawaii. Samoa has two large hotels at Apia, the legendary Aggie Grey’s and the Kitano Tusitala, and several recently opened small upmarket resorts. But Fua Hazelman, chief of the Samoa Visitors Bureau, says "What do we want? We definitely want extra hotel rooms." Hazelman believes that Samoa needs a new four-star resort. "We need more upmarket resorts in the village although the government says it wants one big one. We would prefer several good beach resorts in the 70- to 100-room range scattered about and managed by name brands."

VANUATU:

Visitor bureau chief:Vanuatu's Kalpai

Since independence in 1980 Vanuatu has had two large Port Vila-located flagship resort hotels and about a dozen smaller hotels in and around Vila. That scene is hardly changed. Linda Kalpoi, head of the National Tourist Office, says while extra Air Vanuatu flights to Australia have ended an access bottleneck there are only rumors of substantial hotel projects. Vanuatu is having success, however, with encouraging outer island villages to run very small, basic but regulated bungalow resorts. More than 20 of these have opened in the last three years. "Most European visitors want to go to the outer islands to see the volcanoes, see the land dive, visit the custom villages," Kalpoi says.

COOK ISLANDS:
While last year’s surge of visitors into Rarotonga is making the Cook Island rethink its capacity to absorb many more, the government is keen to complete a resort project begun more than a decade ago. This stalled at the cost to the country’s handful of taxpayers of at least US$35 million. An agreement was signed with Royale Takitumu Holdings Company to complete the shell of the Vaimaanga Hotel; the 206-room hotel is due to open next year as part of the Hilton management chain.

TONGA:
Except for a small resort just opened by American investors on an island in Vava’u, Tonga’s efforts to attract investment in upmarket resorts remain fruitless.

FIJI:
In Fiji, the Fiji Visitors Bureau says the opening of at least one 300-room resort a year is what is needed to cope with predicted growth. But the political outlook, still fluid and uncertain since the coup, make investors uncertain.