“The management and staff are our greatest assets.”
Above: the Pearl Award Ceremony where management and staff are awarded for their loyalty and dedication to the company
We worked very
closely with MEPA;
in fact we spent a
whole week locked up
with them, looking
at designs and then
getting our designers
to work through the
night to come up
with something better
INSIDER SPECIAL EDITION
and we always repaid our loans!
We have always enjoyed and appreciated our good relationships with
all of these. And most importantly,
none of this would have been possible for me without the constant
support of my wife Dolores.”
eighteen months after we started.” The group also entered into
a consortium with Westin and
Corinthia to operate the licence
for the Dragonara casino, which
it did for thirteen years before
losing it to a higher bidder.
Was there any let-up now? You
might have expected there to be
but no, because another opportunity presented itself. The land
on which the St Julian’s Radisson
stands had been earmarked by the
government for a five star hotel
some time before and indeed Island Hotels had had expectations
that they would be the project
developer. In the event the land
went to a French group but they
decided not to proceed and sold
the title to Island Hotels. “I fixed
the target of opening a hotel on
this site two-and-a-half years
later and in the end we opened
So did Island Hotels sit back and
rest on its laurels? “Well there
was a quieter period of consolidation up to 2001 but then there
was 9/11, things went a bit crazy
and during that time we saw another opportunity. I guess we saw
a bit further than our noses.” They
spent more than a year in negotiations to acquire the site on which
the Radisson Blu Resort and Spa,
Golden Sands by Golden Bay now
stands. “Originally we thought we
would do something similar to the
Coastline but then we decided to
start from scratch, bring in the
bulldozers, and start all over again.
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