January 2017 | Business View Caribbean

30 31 enough for it. So, the tourist has to stop at one of the other regional airports, like Barbados, or Trinidad and Tobago, or St. Lucia, and then take a smaller plane to come to St. Vincent. Now, many of those countries are also competing for tourists. And if you think about someone wanting to have a vacation in the Caribbean, and having to spend so much time getting to their destination, it becomes an unattractive proposi- tion. When you have to take a plane fromMiami and then wait for six or seven hours, sometimes, for a connecting flight to St. Vincent, it puts St. Vincent at a disadvantage. “So, we recognized that in order to build our tourism sector, we had to solve the air access problem; we had to have an airstrip and an air- port that allows for direct flights to the destina- tions where the tourists are coming. We need- The International Airport Development Company Limited ed a strip that can accept jets that are coming from the U.K., from Canada, and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. And we are going to have the possibility, now. We have a facility that can accommodate jets coming from just about any- where, because our airstrip allows us to accept planes as large as a 7-400 wing.” While realizing that a new,modern airport would be essential to the country’s economic future, the cost of the project was daunting. “For a small country like St. Vincent, at the time when we proposed the project in 2004, the cost was estimated to be about 40 percent of the GDP of the country,” says Matthias. “And for any project that is so large relative to the size of the econo- my, you knowyou’re going to have problems if you try to finance it using debt. So,what we had to do was relyon friendlypartners to assist us.”As part of the financing package that the IADCLput together, Matthias says that therewas a“healthyhelping of support”from friendlycountries. “Over the years,we got significant support from Cuba,”he states. “They did not provide funding but they did provide technical support; many engineers and technicians and operators came here and assisted us since 2005, and have helped us with the designs and with work on the airfield. We got support from Venezuela – they provided the initial set of earth moving equipment that we needed. We built this airport on land where