The first steps to­wards the es­tab­lish­ment of an Air­port City at Pi­ar­co were tak­en on Wednes­day as the sod was turned for the Four Points by Sher­a­ton Ho­tel. Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said this mo­ment had been 20 years in the mak­ing.

“I re­mem­ber about five years ago, I said that we have to get this project go­ing. This project is over 20 years in the mak­ing, and close to $100 mil­lion in in­fra­struc­tur­al in­vest­ment that was just ly­ing idle here and we’ve de­cid­ed we’ve had to have some­thing start­ed,” said Sinanan who ex­plained that it was his view that the project could cre­ate thou­sands of jobs and cre­ate an av­enue for for­eign ex­change.

“This is the first Aeropark in the Caribbean and this is re­al­ly a dream come true. What we an­tic­i­pate com­ing out of this de­vel­op­ment is close to 5,000 to 6,000 per­ma­nent well-pay­ing jobs. We ex­pect this project will be a project where we will at­tract for­eign in­vest­ments and one that re­sounds to more US cur­ren­cy com­ing in­to T&T,” he said

Gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of T&T Hay­den New­ton con­firmed the AATT had been look­ing for an an­chor ten­ant to kick­start life at the North­ern Avi­a­tion Park for some time. The ho­tel’s con­struc­tion, it is hoped will ush­er in much-need­ed busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty in and around the air­port.

“Air­ports world­wide are evolv­ing from a mere trans­porta­tion stage and are be­com­ing mul­ti­ple-pur­pose cen­tres for di­verse busi­ness and in­no­va­tion. So, in tan­dem with this in­ter­na­tion­al trend, the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of T&T is adopt­ing the mod­ern avi­a­tion con­cept of the growth of an air­port city around our aero­drome and as such, the air­port pi­o­neered this first air­port city in the Caribbean. And this in­volves the com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ment of the es­tates sur­round­ing the air­port and gives op­por­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness­es for which there is close prox­im­i­ty to the air­port. And where we have the ad­van­tage in terms of lo­gis­tics,” said New­ton, who ex­plained the push for the de­vel­op­ment was on­ly re­in­forced by the chal­lenges faced dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

New­ton ac­knowl­edged that the air­port was start­ing to see num­bers clos­er to what had been ex­pe­ri­enced be­fore the pan­dem­ic, but he stressed it still need­ed to look for oth­er forms of rev­enue.

He said: “The air­port has learned se­ri­ous lessons from COVID-19 ex­pe­ri­ence. We have strength­ened our re­solve to cre­ate re­silience, and are mak­ing ef­forts to re­duce the fi­nan­cial risk of be­ing se­vere­ly af­fect­ed by fu­ture shocks to glob­al avi­a­tion. One pil­lar in our strat­e­gy is the max­imi­sa­tion of the op­por­tu­ni­ties to gen­er­ate di­verse non-aero­nau­ti­cal rev­enue streams.”

The $156 mil­lion ho­tel which is set to have over 150 rooms is al­so be­ing seen as an in­trigu­ing prospect by Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell as he ex­pects nu­mer­ous sec­tors will ben­e­fit from the ho­tel both in its con­struc­tion phase and up­on its com­ple­tion and op­er­a­tional­i­sa­tion.

“We al­so ex­pect that hun­dreds per­haps by our ac­counts over 500 per­sons will be em­ployed dur­ing the con­struc­tion phase of this ho­tel. And dur­ing the op­er­a­tional phase, we ex­pect at least 200 per­sons to be di­rect­ly em­ployed at the ho­tel. But in­di­rect­ly we an­tic­i­pate that this will cause a great deal of stim­u­la­tion in oth­er sec­tors, our im­proved agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, our ro­bust man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, and of course, our ser­vices sec­tor,” said Mitchell, who ex­plained ex­pressed the hope that the farm­ers would pro­duce goods which would be pur­chased and utilised by the ho­tel.

The strate­gic lo­ca­tion of the ho­tel, he said, would al­so place it for ide­al use by flight crews which he not­ed had re­ceived up­dat­ed guide­lines con­cern­ing rest re­quire­ments.

“We are al­so look­ing at our ar­rival num­bers and bring­ing them back to our pre-pan­dem­ic num­bers and post-pan­dem­ic en­cour­ag­ing growth in our ar­rival num­bers.

“But specif­i­cal­ly for a ho­tel in this lo­ca­tion, in 2019, the ar­rival num­bers for crew alone were close to 6,000. And that’s im­por­tant for a ho­tel or any ho­tel in this lo­ca­tion. And we ex­pect those num­bers to in­crease in the years to come fol­low­ing the new fed­er­al avi­a­tion rule that man­dates greater rest pe­ri­ods for flights avi­a­tion crew,” he said.

Na­tale Bar­ran­co, di­rec­tor of Pres­tige Ho­tels Ltd and Prin­ci­pal of Ur­ban Ar­chi­tect, al­so gave the as­sur­ance that the ho­tel would be built with the coun­try’s car­bon foot­print in mind as it would not pro­vide on-site elec­tric ve­hi­cle charg­ing ports but will al­so fea­ture an ar­ray of pho­to­volta­ic so­lar pan­els on the build­ing

“We’re us­ing lo­cal­ly sourced build­ing ma­te­ri­als and dec­o­ra­tive ma­te­ri­als through­out which will help strength­en build­ings for car­bon foot­print all ex­pand­ing cul­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of T&T with­in the aes­thet­ics of the de­sign re­gard­ing the cre­ation of the pos­i­tive so­cial en­vi­ron­ment,” said Bar­ran­co.