Architect speaks well of features of Holiday Inn at hand over last Saturday

by Eldonté Samuel

The new Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites located at Diamond, was handed over to the government of St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), last Saturday, November 16, 2024.
The four-floor, 93 room,18 suites hotel will be officially opened this Friday, November 22. It will be fully booked as its first guests will be the West Indies and Bangladesh cricket teams, scheduled to play at the Arnos Vale Sports Complex from December 16-20, 2024.

Romel Ollivierre

Lead Architect, Romel Ollivierre, giving an overview of the project, touted the features that SVG’s Holiday Inn boasts compared to other Holiday Inn Express Hotels worldwide.

Ollivierre said the 59,000 sq ft ‘prototype design’, is one of the parent company’s, InterContinental Hotels Group’s (IHG), more successful designs, which will provide a fresh, contemporary space for visitors.

“One IHG rep’ puts it very simply; it works. It just works,” Ollivierre related.

One of the bonus features he spoke of that makes it more ‘Vincy’ was the location- being close to the second oldest forest reserve in the Western Hemisphere, the Kings Hill Forest Reserve.

“The idea is that even though the area is being developed, we want to keep it as clean as possible. It does not have to be a concrete jungle,” Ollivierre stated as their reason for having a green scape around the property.

The architect said that due to the technologies used to construct the business hotel, the rooms will be more spacious than those of other Holiday Inns.

“Trust me, when you enter, you feel this difference,” Ollivierre remarked.

He added that there was one area to which his team paid special attention- accessibility.

“In addition to that, there’s a total of 15 accessible guest rooms. That’s 15 out of 93, sixteen percent of these guest rooms are accessible,” he stated, adding that accessible in this case means that they would be convenient for persons with mobility, visual, and hearing challenges.

“All interior room signs and directional signs have braille engraved into them so that persons who are visually impaired can navigate and identify their rooms,” Ollivierre explained, as he was met with a round of applause from the audience.

The hotel will also feature a 50-person conference room; an outdoor pool that connects to an outdoor breakfast area; and a 24-hour fitness gym.

The brand IHG, was launched in 1991, and over the last 30 years the design of the building has changed to allow more modern architecture, according to Ollivierre who described the design as simple, “from the exterior finishes to the interior furnishing, the simplified building design with clean lines that reduce clutter for that contemporary look and feel.”

The CARICOM Development Fund (CDF) contributed a total of EC$28.9 million towards the construction of the hotel under the bank’s concessional resources window for Member States.

Director for the CDF Regional Development Division, Lenox Forte, expressed his confidence in this project because of the impact it had in providing employment during the construction phase, stating that, “… CDF retains high expectations it will continue to have on the promotion of new investment in the accommodation and tourism sector”.

The hotel would cater to niches within the tourism industry, primarily, but not exclusively, to business travellers, Forte said. He further explained that the project was conceptualised using the average hotel occupancy rate and found that it would yield a positive return.

“In layman’s English, it should be profitable. You should be making money off it.”

The hand over of the hotel was initially scheduled for the 2023 tourist season but it failed to meet the scheduled dates.

NH International (Caribbean) was the contractor on this project, and signed a EC$52 million with the government SVG for the construction of Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites |

on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. Several other regional companies were engaged in the work on the hotel, including Williams Sale Partnerships(WSP), the mechanical engineering and plumbing consultant; KS&P which aided in structural engineering; and BCQS, an independent property development and construction consultant out of Barbados.