Dominica’s tourism industry received a staggering blow from Hurricane Maria and total losses could run to over $190-million, Director of Tourism, Colin Piper has said.
He said at a press conference on Monday that presently only 27 percent of hotel rooms are open to the market.
He pointed out that the Discover Dominica Authority has made an assessment of the majority of hotel rooms on the island and recovery is going to be slow.
“Just to give you some information on working with the folks from the world bank, we have assessed damages in the amount of EC$54-million for the tourism industry and losses in the amount of $191-million,” he stated.
Piper pointed out that the island’s hotel room stock suffered the heaviest damages.
“Currently we have 243 rooms that are currently serving the market,” he noted. “That is about 27 percent of pre-Maria room stock.”
He said before Maria, there were about 909 rooms and about 39 percent or 358 rooms were severely damaged “and as such we do not feel they will be back servicing clients before 12 months.”
“And we also have about 34 percent or 308 of the rooms that we think will come back little by little and our estimation is that about ten percent of that room stock will come back on a monthly basis starting in December,” he stated. “So currently we have 243, we anticipate of the 308, say 30 come back on a monthly basis through September that will take us to 550 rooms, if all goes well.”
Despite the grim statistics, Piper has identified January 1, 2018, as a milestone for the island to be in a state of readiness for the cruise ship season.
He said the authorities thought the season was lost but based on the pace of some of the site rehabilitation and some of the work the tourism ministry is doing, it is all a go.
“We are communicating that to all the stakeholders,” Piper stated. “The cruise sector amounts to about $25-million in spend and so of the losses, the $191-million that I mentioned, cruise would be about $25-million of that.”
He revealed that the tourism service sector which includes tour operators, vendors, other support services like taxis and the like have suffered about $4.3-million in damages.
Piper noted that building back the tourism sector is going to cost some $70-million.
“And so when we look at the total recovery, damages, building back better, rebuilding according to climate change resiliency codes and the like, we anticipate it will be upwards of EC$70-million,” he said.
If we have lost so much money shouldn’t the minister of tourism resign. I would only pay the minister one third of his salary until things improve. This minister of tourism is the worst EVER!!!!!
Help people to rebuild there houses. Give them water and food. Then carnival. What is more important????
All you blaming hurricane Maria for everything but no one blames hurricane Skerrit for breaking down the entire fabric of our society, to the point that is difficult, if not impossible to recover from Maria. Every body talking about building a new and better Dominica, but no one talks about how we going to do it. We cannot build a better Dominica when our passports are being sold to all sorts of wanted crminals around the world and every month we hearing of a corrupt diplomat in trouble with international law agencies. To get the money to rebuild Dominica Roosevelt Skerrit Must resign or fired period. The damage of hurricane Maria may have cost the country about $190 million dollars but I have no doubt that hurricane Skerrit has cost the country over two billion dollars in cash and uncountable amount in reputation. I am also ready for your thumbs down and character assassination.
While the traditional stayover and cruise tourism sectors suffered significant losses and that has been recorded by the Tourism Officials. We the suppliers of accommodation and services to the DeVry/ Ross University School of Medicine has suffered tremendous losses as well and unfortunately these Tourism Officials did not take our plight into consideration.
DeVry/ Ross has moved out all their students and teaching and research faculty and some administrative staff, and are now conducting classes aboard a cruise ship in St Kitts, and it is alleged that they plan is to relocate next year to the Lincoln Memorial University in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA.
The have asked all landlords to return the all students advanced rent payments and security deposits for the September to December 2017 Semester. This amounts to millions of dollars in returned income/ revenue.
Picard is now a ghost town with most businesses being unable to sustain operations much longer… So sucking salt has…
Oh me oh my! That’s a very big loss of revenue and I don’t know how we going to do without it. That loss reminds me of the importance of saving or using the penny that we have today wisely because we never know what will happen to us tomorrow and how we might be in need of every cent. I say this because from March 2017 up to weeks before Maria PM Skerrit was on a spending spree and was literally, as I understand it, was dumping money everywhere as if money did not matter. I think it would be important to add up all the amounts he distributed in the name of “small business” when we know for a fact that many were not involved in any small business whatsoever, and see how close to that $190 million. Also, we need to add the US$30 k a month he dumped on US strategic firm and tell us if all the monies we dumped exceeded the $190 million loss.
Da suffered a serious blow from Irma who came upon us as a thief in the night and caught us naked, except maybe for Minister McIntyre aka “I must admit”, who said he didn’t have short pants on but was dressed in long pants and was ready. Where did Maria come from? How did she just snitch up on us? We heard of Irma but she did not even pass our way. We heard of Irma’s destruction of Barbuda, Tortola, St. Thomas, St Martin and others. When it was clear that we were speared from Irma our goals were set very high and it appeared we were going to have a very could and early cruise season. Then we heard of tropical storm lee which later turned into a hurricane but like Irma, Lee posed no serious threat to us. But while planning for Lee, Maria sneaked in on us as a TS and possibly Cat 2 hurricane but we paid her no mind. All of a sudden she came on us as an armed woman that came for her husband that was stolen from her. I must admit our wickedness had reached max and we couldn’t run.
I Must admit that if we had treated our escape from Irma and Lee as a warning from God that we needed to set our house in order and repent of our evils, probably there would not even be a hurricane named Maria. But we didn’t. After Irma speared us while other islands were destroyed, we saw it as a sign that God what we were doing was right and honestly immediately after Irma I thought evil was rewarded over good and therefore evil was going to be our way of life from that point on. In fact A DAY after we were speared from Irma and Lee, one would expect Skerrit and his religious gang to announce a Thanksgiving Day for being speared but instead here is what we saw on DNO and the nasty anti Linton comments: https://dominicanewsonline.com/news/homepage/news/crime-court-law/attorneys-for-pinard-byrne-to-petition-court-to-declare-linton-bankrupt/. Well I guess even those that were going after Linton were made bankrupt by Maria, as well as thousand of us. Evil will be punished by God!
Yes, Barbara is still here! Thanks to the grace and mercy of God!
I promised myself not to click on this site ever again and I’m not sure why I did today.
I just cannot believe that we have simply picked up where we left off before Maria, venom and hatred on radio and social media and of course, always directed at the other person while whitewashing those we like and support.
“I must admit”, I sat through Maria and the feeling I had was that the hurricane was viciously angry as it ripped and tore and scattered and banged. I said to myself if Dominicans survive this, I am sure that we will turn over a new leaf and purge our anger and resentment against each other and put our unjust and unfair characterisations of our brothers and sisters to rest.
I guess I was wrong! If Maria didn’t change us, only God can, so I will spend the rest of my days praying for Dominicans because we just don’t get it!
If tourism suffered that much loss I don’t want to hear the number on agriculture, since it was the third highest money earner behind sale of passports and tourism. So now Dominica is driving on one wheel which is, sale of passports but unfortunately we will never get to know our loss or gain because it is a dear secret reserved for Skerrit and Skerrit alone. Not even Mano knows. When it is time for election campaign we will just see large sum of monies coming from every hole on planet, just like drug dealers that never report earnings but when they ready to spend they just pay cash.
Another big loss we not hearing a thing about from the authorities is that of Ross University. We don’t know if Ross is gone for a short time or for good. One thing we cannot doubt is that Maria put Dominica in deep pit toilet that I don’t know if we will ever overcome especially if we continue to remain drinking that red juice of Skerrit that has Da in that mess we saw before Maria aswell as after
It’s a very difficult situation for him on one hand have carnival to bring folks and revenue to the Island then on the other hand they can’t come with no hotel rooms available. My advised then cancel carnival and used the little resources to help holtiers
Can be a tough decision but no choice but to break tradition.
I concur! Because not even private individuals that can put up their family now….anybody whose house was intact after Maria are sheltering other family and friends.
Carnival 2018 is NOT going to give us a quick money….we have to understand that the road to recovery is going to be a long long one.
What I want the Prime Minister and the whole Cabinet to do is to find out what is the holdup on insurance payment…where I live I haven’t seen not one house being re-roofed or any kind of recovery activity.
It’s time for insurance to give people their money so they can restore their comfort….people are already struggling with loss of water and electricity plus cable tv and internet….dont make life unnecessarily hard for people nuh. Stupes!