The Baha Mar resort, which in January announced that it would open four hotels totaling 2,200 rooms on the Bahamas' New Providence island on March 27, has once again been beset by delays.
Now, the development says it will have rooms available at only one of its hotels this week.
On March 27, the $3.5 billion project, said to be the most expensive development in the Bahamas' history, will have finished rooms only at its 1,000-room Baha Mar Casino & Hotel, Baha Mar spokeswoman Alyssa Bushey confirmed.
Bushey declined to disclose how many rooms at that property would be open or how many reservations had been taken for the period starting March 27, though she confirmed that the property's 100,000-square-foot casino, which includes 1,500 slot machines and 150 table games, would be operational.
And while the public spaces at the 300-room SLS Lux at Baha Mar, the 200-room Rosewood at Baha Mar and 707-room Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar will all be open by the end of this week, rooms at the SLS and Rosewood won't be available until "shortly after" March 27, Bushey said.
Rooms at the Grand Hyatt, whose availability was pushed back to Baha Mar's official grand opening event on May 1, remain on schedule for that date, according to Bushey. She added that many "resort core" amenities, including various entertainment and recreation areas such as Beach Sanctuary and the Jack Nicklaus-designed TPC at Baha Mar golf course, will be open this week.
A search on the Baha Mar Casino and Hotel's website shows first rooms available to the public starting April 13, while the website for the SLS property, which will include 107 luxury residences, shows availability starting April 29. The Rosewood Baha Mar is taking reservations for stays starting in June, according to its phone-reservation representative.
As recently as March 9, Baha Mar representatives said its flagship hotel as well as the SLS and Rosewood would be fully open by the end of this month. However, Travel Weekly last week was informed by John Buchanan, a reporter with STR's Hotel News Now publication, that Baha Mar would not meet that deadline.
Bushey declined to give specifics on the reasons behind the most recent delay, though she did reference an islandwide blackout earlier this month that left parts of the island without power for more than a day as an example of some of the Bahamas' infrastructure issues that can hinder development progress.
"If you build anything in the Caribbean, it takes twice as long and costs twice as much," said Scott Smith, Atlanta-based senior vice president at PKF Consulting, adding that resort properties like Baha Mar are better served by having room delays with the amenities complete than taking in guests when the amenities aren't ready. "With the magnitude of this property, I'm not surprised one bit at all."
Baha Mar, which is being backed by China's state-run Export-Import Bank and constructed by thousands of Chinese workers employed by China State Construction Engineering Corp., broke ground in Nassau's Cable Beach area in February 2011. The project had been scheduled to open to the public by the end of 2014 until last August, when the opening date was pushed back until this spring.
Robert Sands, Baha Mar's senior vice present of administration and external affairs, said at the time that the project was still on budget, but he allowed that the resort was "an extremely complex project."
A fifth hotel at the resort, formerly the 694-room Sheraton Nassau Beach Hotel, was reflagged in late 2013 as the Melia Nassau Beach and will be renamed the Melia at Baha Mar once it completes a $19 million renovation. The property, which will be Baha Mar's only all-inclusive resort, is scheduled to be completed early next year.
Baha Mar is among the projected or upgraded resorts in the Nassau area looking to take advantage of a steady increase in Bahamas tourism numbers. While cruise passengers accounted for almost 80% of the country's 6.3 million visitors last year, stopover arrivals rose about 5% last year, to 1.3 million, according to Bahamas' Ministry of Tourism.
Meanwhile, about eight miles east of Baha Mar, Atlantis Paradise Island last September joined Marriott International's Autograph Collection in a franchise agreement under which Marriott provided a $100 million mezzanine loan for improvements to the 3,414-room megaresort, which opened in 1994.
And while Baha Mar's most recent delay may inconvenience some guests who had planned on an early-spring arrival, the impact on business will likely be far less than what resulted from the previous delay that pushed the opening from late last year to this spring, according to Smith.
In fact, some tour operators might have already factored in such delays to ensure that reservations would be honored. Southern California-based Pleasant Holidays is booking Baha Mar's flagship resort and the Grand Hyatt property for stays starting in June, though it is preparing to take earlier bookings if rooms become available, according to CEO Jack Richards.
"We are selling rooms for June 1 and beyond, so there appears to be huge interest in the resort complex," Richards said.
Smith added: "If they don't open until May or June, it's not going to matter that much, as long as they have at least some sort of soft opening by the end of hurricane season in October. After six months, nobody's going to remember."