Hazel Wilmot, diminutive, about 50, close cropped sandy-to-gray hair, stood in the corridor of her hotel holding a tiny girl in nappies, giving me the unvarnished and unsolicited lowdown on her business. Her power bill is 11000 pounds a quarter and insurance adds two and a half, three to that, so that before salaries she faces 14000 pounds in expenses right off the bat.
In a perfect world the guest rooms would pay that and she could start from there, paying salaries with proceeds from the bar and snack bar and restaurant. But, you may surmise, this is not a perfect world.
She will be forced to close the hotel for six months, maybe April until October. There are no bookings then. This means she will terminate 16 of 20 staff, retaining only her four senior managers, fearing if she lets them go they will never return. Some of the sixteen will voluntarily go on a month leave, at this end or the next, and that will help. She will bleed the remaining four salaries as straight up, vivid losses.
The reason for no bookings is the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. There are no hotel rooms in Cape Town and the European airlines, she says, have raised airfares unconscionably to make hay with international football fans. So would-be visitors to St. Helena can’t transit the only country from which a ship sails to St. Helena.
(The RMS St. Helena will cease operations from Walvis Bay, Namibia about two weeks from now, citing low passenger demand. Walvis Bay is the only other southern African port supplying tourists to St. Helena.)
Plus, Hazel laments, with reduced demand for passenger bookings this summer, the RMS has applied to be a floating hotel off Cape Town for the games. If they don’t sail to St. Helena at all for a month or more, she hasn’t even got a shot at housing tourists.
St. Helena is an island of 5,000 people, down from 8,000, which some locally worry is in terminal decline. The May U.K. elections have effectively frozen a decision on building an airport there for the next half year. Even after that, the prospects of such a 250 or so million dollar expenditure this far out into the territorial realm seems unlikely in the economic climate, and even if the airport project out at Prosperous Bay (see photo nearby) should be funded there would be some years involved before the first 737’s would land.
(site of the proposed airport - Prosperous Bay)
Still, if Hazel could just sell her property back home in Botswana she could make right her commitment here on St. Helena. Sometimes God puts obstacles in your way only to open doors later on, she says. I tell her that if she can see her way through this new year of 2010 she will surely make it from there.
She hopes so.
(The RMS crew responds that they never meant to be a floating hotel during the games, except for two nights prior to a scheduled sailing, accommodating passengers who otherwise wouldn’t have a place to stay. Chief Officer Peter Milton told us they always meant to begin to call at Walvis Bay as an experiment, to see if it attracted cargo or new passengers. They’ve shown the flag, as it were, for five years now before deciding to pull the plug.
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