Minister of Planning, Economic Affairs and Development, Dr. Kennedy Swaratsingh, believes the new airport terminal in Tobago will remain underutilised unless it’s matched by a surge in hotel development.
Speaking at the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce’s Business Outlook on Wednesday, the Minister noted that, although the state-of-the-art airport is capable of handling up to three million passengers annually, the supporting infrastructure for the incoming passengers is lagging dangerously behind.
“Tobago needs probably about three, probably four hotels. Tobago also needs four and five-star hotels because one of the ways in which you can grow the viability of an airport as well as have FBOs, to have private planes coming, so there’s a significant amount of opportunity. Economic zones is another one for airports. So we have, in Trinidad and Tobago, we have a significant amount of assets that we need to find that have not been utilised fully or completely or even utilised at all. The airports are two of those assets.”
He also emphasised that while hotel construction provides a short-term economic boost through jobs and materials, the real returns take years to materialise.
“When you build a hotel, you will get some uplift from construction, but it will take probably 36 months to 40 months for a hotel to come into circulation because the booking cycle for those things takes time, and you have to book way in advance before. So in the four years or the five years that we will have it this term, even if we start to invest in hotels now, it will take a while for that to materialise, but it’s important to invest.”
The former administration held a ‘practical completion’ ceremony for the new Tobago Airport Terminal in mid-March and had stated, at the time, that the first plane with passengers would have been able to utilise the Terminal Building by July 2025.