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Business View Caribbean
Elegant Hotels – Barbados
For the discerning traveler
The word “elegant” has the following definitions: taste-
fully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.; pleas-
ingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner.
So, based on those descriptions, if you’re going to call
anything “elegant,” you had better back it up with the
goods. On the island of Barbados, in the Lesser Antil-
les region of the Caribbean, there is a group of hostel-
ries that calls itself the “Elegant Hotels Group.” And,
for the discerning traveler, it definitely has the goods.
The Elegant Hotels Group was formed in 1998 from a
collection of five Barbados properties that had been
constructed independently in the 1950s and 1960s
and was previously known as the St. James Beach Ho-
tels – The Tamarind, The House, Colony Club, Crystal
Cove, and Turtle Beach. This past March, the Group
expanded to include the Waves Hotel and Spa which is
slated to open for business, this August.
Keeping the Group’s elegance up to its own high stan-
dards is the responsibility of Sunil Chatrani, company
CEO. And that takes both money and time. “We do
renovations every year,” he explains. “Typical for the
industry is spending about four percent of revenue on
what we call regular F, F, and E (Furniture, Fixtures,
and Equipment). We go beyond that; we spend five or
