Bay Gardens Resorts

Business View Caribbean 7 add 60 or 70 rooms, which would roughly double the property in size.” The new rooms will be called the Residence Club at Bay Gardens Beach Resort, and according to Destang, they will be more exclusive and offer more ameni- ties. They will also qualify as an approved real estate investment project under St. Lucia’s newly-launched Citizen by Investment Program, as the island becomes the fifth Caribbean nation, after Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and St. Kitts & Nevis, to offer such an option. Destang believes that the program is particularly at- tractive to people who are from countries with visa re- strictions, such as Russia, China, and parts of the Mid- dle East, “and some Americans,” he adds, “perhaps, because of all the tax and other regulations, may want to become a citizen of another country and renounce their U.S. citizenship. That’s not as common, but it has happened a few times.” Destang is not unaware of the Program’s economic po- tential. “It’s given us another opportunity to diversify our product mix,” he says. “We’ve been selling time shares for many years and have three to four hundred owners, right now. And this allows us to get into an- other field of investment and another way to raise the capital needed to make this project a reality.” In addition to his duties running Bay Gardens, another hat that Sanovnik wears is the presidency of the St. Lucia Hotel and Tourism Association (SLHTA), the is- land’s largest private sector organization whose mem- bers include hotels, restaurants, airlines, banks, tours and attractions, and destination management compa- nies, among others. He talks about some of the group’s recent initiatives: “We have quite a few exciting projects that we’re work- ing on, which already have benefitted the industry,” he begins. “One of the major ones of late is the Ag- ricultural and Tourism Linkages Program. Agriculture was previously St. Lucia’s mainstay which gave way to tourism. And for years, we sort of treated the two as separate and competing priorities, when, in truth, the two can work in harmony.”