Yet another hotel
Submitted by oncidiumfan on Sat, 2011/12/17 - 13:04.
The hotel a couple of blocks south of me has opened. The place inside is gorgeous and has only four bedrooms (all large, all with baths, at least one with walk in closets). I ran the math and at 50% occupancy and rates in the $65 to $85 range, they'll make about US $10,000 a year, which might be enough for them if this isn't their own source of income, which I suspect it isn't. One of the people working there is a tri-lingual German who also worked on the reconstruction. At this point, they're only serving breakfast, but they've got room for a considerable restaurant.
My impression is that the clients so far are Nicaraguans. From what I've heard, hotels generally do a good business over the Christmas holidays as people come to see relatives back home. How this will work later, I don't know. I have family that I'd send there if they came to Nicaragua.
But I'm not sure how many hotels Jinotega can support. Another large house that had been renting for US$500 a month is now going to be turned into another hotel. It's a sprawling one story house built in the 1980s that has many bedrooms (a large christian family has rented it and is now looking for another house). If they set up as a hotel, they'll have to have a couple of people working in it and my impression is that the bedroom are smaller than in the art deco house south of me.
They'll probably skim off some of the Hotel Cafe's customers but they'll be dividing their own customer pool.
Be curious to see what happens. Jinotega functions very well as urban space, but doesn't look like much. I love the setting and the scenery, but I'm not sure scenery is enough nor is Jinotega's that unique.
I wish people had some alternative ideas for things to invest in than yet another hotel.
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Which Jinotega is this?
In my Nicaragua, when you visit the relatives you sleep on their couch or the kid sleeps with the parents offering a guest room. The one time I stayed in Jinotega overnight I had a decent room with private bath for something like C$200. I had a car so I paid C$20 to park it securely off-street.
If someone will pay $65 to $85 to stay in downtown Jinotega I guess I better finish the hotel up here and get rich. Well, other than I don't want to run a hotel.
Jinotega has some rather well-off people connected to it
If the hotel can get blond ex-pats to be the hotel servants, I can see the charm for wealthier Nicaraguans.
I've been inside and saw all the rooms except for the one on the ground floor. It's a first class hotel, would be anywhere, and has enough space inside and in the patio to just not bother with Jinotega at all if one doesn't want to, and has an upstairs fireplace and downstairs dining room and bar.
What people forget is that while half the country is seriously poor, half the country isn't and a minority chunk of the non-poor has international investments and is as well off as any rich people anywhere, with the initial money coming from the poor in Nicaragua, but perhaps not all the money now.
I'll see if I can get some pictures of the inside of the hotel.
I don't question the first luxury hotel and suspect that it will have customers who like the security and the sheer beauty of the interiors. I'm just a bit cynical about a second, third, or fourth hotel trying to do the same thing. I'm excited to see that the Dino's Pizza people are creating a new Italian restaurant, but I'm not sure how many deluxe restaurants Jinotega can support either (probably more than the hotels).
I stayed with a friend in a similar place in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, and paid something like $170 for the night and there is nothing in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas other than a beautiful courthouse and, three miles away, the Tall Grass Prairie National Park. The woman who ran it made it work (I think she had about seven rooms and a superb restaurant and was a retired airline stewardess, so knew how to make people feel comfortable and included). I normally don't pay that kind of money for hotels, but we kinda got stuck with nothing else open or taking dogs. It was worth it, though, one of the more memorable moments in a trip out to Denver and back. The right hotel and the right staff can transcend the location.
Rebecca Brown
Who? Which People?
"What people forget is"....
That happens a lot in your world doesn't it, people are always forgetting or don't know what you do know.
Key West Pirate, Phil, and everyone else
...who talks about the Nicaraguans being poor, or the country Nicaraguans being the real Nicaraguans.
Sort of like we had people who assumed that smart people in Appalachia weren't real Appalachians.
Rebecca Brown
Just not interested in them
Much like rich people in the US, I don't have much interest in rich people in Nicaragua. What I want to do is help decrease the gap between rich and poor here. After two years in Costa Rica I figured out they were trying to create a mini-US. I moved to Nicaragua because I found the people here so much more interesting.
Which people? Not the ones in the SUVs but the ones that live their day-to-day life. Ones who will magically create a party if someone shows up with a bottle of rum. The people I meet on the bus going to/from Estelí.
One of my favorite memories was when I met some folks that wanted to chat with me and hang out with my dog. (It's in my blog.) My Spanish sucked at the time but they just wanted to be real. We sat across the street from their house. They brought out arroz con leche. The kids played, We chatted.
These are the kind of people I want to hang out with. The kind of people that I would feel good about renting a $100/might room to for C$100/night.
Yeah, I heard that Costa Rica was California with palm trees
My neighbors are probably about middle class for Nicaraguan, not rich, but certainly not poor. They live their day to day lives, too. The guys next door have a used truck, not an SUV, and the guy uses it for getting things to and from his 22 manzana finca that the FSLN apparently gave his father or grandfather.
Tourism doesn't decrease the gap between rich and poor. I don't have the study to hand, but one of the county managers gave me a copy of a study done in the US that showed mountain counties that went for industrial development ended up with higher per capita incomes, and my brother who lived in Boone, NC (went to school there) saw that Hound Ears, a major resort there, didn't really improve life for the poorer people. Tourism is a rich man's game and a poor woman's crap job (most of the jobs are for women after the guys get finished with construction. A friend here says there's a similar study for Latin American tourism. I haven't seen that. Short term jobs for construction, then mostly jobs for women.
What helped in my rural county were niche manufacturing jobs, often with somewhat specialized skills that people could learn on the job. Throughout the region, a lot of the straight forward textile mills closed. These were what the usual hired consultants recommended that the rural counties court. Small scale farming keeps people from starving there as here, and many families would have one member in the mill or teaching for the health insurance and the other one farming. My dairy man was such a farmer -- he had people trying to buy land from him and said "It was a 93 acre farm when I bought it and it will be a 93 acre farm when I die."
Tourism with niche manufacturing jobs might work better. Colorado has people making the gear that other people use for Colorado sports.
I think tourism is one thing that will make some people money, but as a solution for Nicaragua's income spread, nope. The retirement industry, great for realtors and undertakers, not really so great for everyone else, but better than weekend cottages where everyone brought their food from home. All these things are almost as bad as raw material extraction industries.
If that's all anyone can do, and people don't have land or access to land as tenant farmers, then it's better than nothing. But if the country or region starts saying, "we don't need to improve education here, all these people are going to do is be hotel gardeners and maid," then it's time for another revolution.
Rebecca Brown
Careful what you wish for
..."time for another revolution". La Prensa were stirring the same pot today:
http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2011/12/19/ambito/84266
The country has no conditions to improve public safety and food due to the dependence with the Councils of Citizen Power (CPC), according to the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (NAHR) today will present its annual report.
This is compounded by the presence of armed groups in the country, called Nicaraguan Patriotic Command (Comandos Patrióticos Nicaragüenses - COPAN in Spanish) who are a reality that the authorities can no longer hide.
The fear has increased migration, according to executive director of the NAHR, Roberto Petray.
Another point that NAHR has concluded is that Nicaraguans migrate because of lack of employment, the presence of Copan, abuse of power and authoritarian centralism from the executive.
Another quote: "Nicaragua is drifting without conditions to enhance survival conditions for food and public safety ... having to be conditioned to join and belong to the CPC's ruling party".
The report has abundant details in interviews with locals in communities of Estelí, Madriz, Nueva Segovia and Jinotega, Matagalpa and the North Atlantic Autonomous Region.
See also:
http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2011/12/19/ambito/84264
La Prensa proves what a free country this is, again
The problem I see with conservative Nicaraguans is that they see the US as their savior. If they could figure out what to do without calling for Uncle Sugar to bail them out, cool, but they simply don't have a track record for being able to stand on their own without US props. The US, for its part, should follow George Washington's advice -- wish other people well but stay out of their internal struggles.
The North Atlantic Autonomous Region has other beefs, and I have a bit more sympathy for them.
The Chammoros have been Conservative since forever. Salman Rushdie had negative opinions of two people when he visited Nicaragua in the 1980s -- one was Violetta and the other one was Ernesto Cardenal. I don't trust all the facts a writer may have, but I really do trust my fellow writers to have good intuitions about character.
The upper classes here have made their money selling their fellow Nicaraguans' labor cheap. The hotel industry is another example of this. Cigar industry, yet another. The cigar factory owners know why they should be living behind a 16 foot masonry wall on the outskirts of Esteli.
Jinotega appears to have had the vote expected here judging from the various parades. Boaco went the other way, which was also consistent with its history (cattle ranching is a more independent thing with fewer seasonal workers). People aren't coming up with proof of massive fraud that I'm aware of; they're just not happy that they lost. There was more proof of fraud in the US 2000 elections, and the EU needs to audit the Diabolt machines.
Russia is having more mass protests over their vote. Turning to the gun isn't always a sign of anything other than representing a violent minority position that's simply trying to bully others.
Still thinking about the reviews of a couple of books that shaped my thinking on this.
Rebecca Brown
Here is why they are doing it:
The National Plan for Sustainable Tourism Development in Nicaragua calls for 27 thousand hotel rooms by the year 2020. Currently Nicaragua has about 8 thousand hotel rooms of which about half are between three to five stars, have good infrastructure and services, however; are mainly in Managua.
Lucy Valenti, the President of the National Chamber of Tourism (Canatur), told the press that Nicaragua needs to attract new and strong investment in order to build the required amount of hotel rooms to ensure that Nicaragua will remain competitive in the region.
Throw in the Law 306 tax advantages and a free place to live as owner manager and it looks attractive to some.
Ah, Tourism, the solution that requires less thinking
Nicaragua has mountains, but so do huge chunks of Canada, the US, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile -- and I think Brazil even has some highlands, too, plus some other places, and that's just this hemisphere.
You guys on the coast are lucky -- not as many miles of sandy coastline as mountains in the world.
Rebecca Brown
What is your point, about the mountains?
Its not clear.
And I call bullshit on the thinking comment.
If what you're selling is mountain views
...the world has a lot of mountains. There's got to be something more than the views to attract people. Jinotega's tourist board appears to be making that mistake now.
I've never met hotel managers that struck me as particularly bright. The good ones are very good with people. I've paid $170 or so to stay at a place in east Kansas where the person running the place knew how to make it worth it. It was such a great hotel that I thought about retiring to Cottonwood Falls, Kansas (which objectively has less going for it than Jinotega). Sort of like you don't need extraordinary intelligence to be a mother of young children, just lots of patience (as I found out when babysitting for a family for several days while the parents were gone).
Rebecca Brown
OK, give us a glimmer of a solution
You are the head of INTUR for Jinotega...
Give us your best shot on a tourist plan for the region.
For real
Forget the generic foreigners. Make it a getaway place for very rich Nicaraguans and the very rich foreigners will show up, too. Import internationally known Spanish musicians and singers to perform at the little hotel, make sure parking is discreet but does not resemble a auto-hotel (I suspect that some of the people these hotels should be attracting aren't married to each others). Have a first class dining room and cultivate regulars so that you can introduce guests to each other along lines of interest (the genius bit at the Hotel Grand Central in Cottonwood Falls). Decorate with the best of Nicaraguan art. Make the place really special to stay in. Have a couple of these linked so that someone drives you from Managua to the first one and then you have good cars driving you on to the next place. You come up to the mountains for a private sheltered weekend. Or your family rents the whole hotel to bring together the family from Granada, Miami, and all the other hot places. One hotel has ponies and horses, maybe carriages.
Bring in some supper theatre for one of the places, bring in a Chinese cook, a Spanish cook, a high end Mexican cook, someone who knows how to do first rate steaks and get tender steaks, someone who knows how to really make great pastries.
Forget being a mass tourism area. Forget even foreign tourists. Make it sensual and luxurious, with music, art, flowers, tours to waterfalls and cliffs in SUVs. Hire birding guides for the birders; coffee fincas for the coffee drinkers who want to see where their coffee came from; fishing guides for people who want to fish.
What I'd be selling is an incredible weekend away from the heat, with entertainment and superb food as good as you used to get in Miami.
If the rich Managuans like it, the embassy people will probably start coming up, too, and then some tourists who only go to places they've heard about from word of mouth.
Middle class people are getting poorer and poorer. No money in them. Rebecca Brown
Sounds like a posh Ruta de Cafe, been around a few years
But getting some new attention. Visitors will follow the route through the five municipalities of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Esteli, Madiz and Nueva Segovia, visiting coffee plantations and meeting pickers, pictured below, exploring local culture and taking ecological trips.
This week:
The Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism with the support of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg announced a lucrative tourism investment of 9 million 183 thousand 600 U.S. dollars for the second stage of development and promotion of tourist attractions in the north of the country under the umbrella of The Coffee Route, which in its first stage involved an investment of 6 million 868 thousand 483 U.S. dollars.
Mayra Salinas, Deputy Minister of Intur stated that the first phase of construction of 31 infrastructure projects, comprehensive museums, parks, houses of culture, among others, and was attended by 29 thousand people in the communities, from providers technical services to participate in the strengthening of micro, small and medium enterprises.
Salinas explained that it will continue to strengthen the five pillars of the first stage: participatory planning, pilot projects, training, technical assistance and financing to micro, small and medium enterprises, MSMEs.
"We hope this second stage to continue what we consolidated in the first stage, to continue working on strengthening local capacities of the five departments integrated into the Coffee Route, precisely for the development of tourism and localities," said Salinas.
The five departments that make up the Ruta del Café are Jinotega, Matagalpa, Estelí, Madriz and Nueva Segovia.
http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/economia/236017
The Division one, big named Nicaraguans are onto your plan and have the family properties in those ares. The "Tier Two Rich Nicaraguans" can be a bit fickle. They will stay in a $150 to $200 a night room but bring a cooler of food and drink or go out for good quality Nica food. The fancy stuff doesn't interest them as much as we think it would. Some of the "New Rich" (post 2006) can be even worse....all Prado and Prada....and no class!! (did I say that, oops!)
The cafe alone probably isn't enough
The most expensive wines are quite a bit higher than the most expensive coffee. Will people come see coffee being produced in the same way they make tours to see vineyards?
There's Bastile already in the Jinotega area for eco-tourism. It's a training facility run by one of the local universities I plan to visit sometime when the discretionary funds are replenished a bit after the recent trips around.
If the Jinotega tourism board wants to attract people to Jinotega, they need to think about how the city looks, among other things. I suspect that $6 million would probably give Jinotega first rate sidewalks, which would certainly improve the look of the place.
It's possibly that local art center is part of this. If so, that's cool.
To satisfy a birder (I'm excruciatingly aware of what a birder wants): you need to have feeders to attract birds; you need to have guides who really know the birds and how to direct people's attention to them (Jaguar guides and our guide at Apoyo know the birds); you need to keep people who aren't birders and who are noisy away (like hordes of school children); you need to have first class accomodations (where we stayed at Apoyo flunked for my friend), and you need to have the bird observation towers (I heard there is one in Leon) and good food (most birders have money and a fair amount of taste). People in Costa Rica and Panama make livings off birders; people here who train as bird guides end up leaving because there's not enough work in Nicaragua, from what we were told at Jaguar.
I had a week of someone explaining why Belize, Panama, and Costa Rica did birding tours better, not that everyone who comes in for eco-tourism will be a birder. But if you don't know how to provide the experience the eco-tourist is looking for, they won't be back, but will go to Costa Rica (more species) or Panama (more species) instead.
Rich Nicaraguans already own coffee fincas or have friends who do. The Prado and Prada crowd might come for specialty shows and private fittings of their favorite designers.
As everyone knows, the coffee folks are drawing an analogy with the various wine country tours both in the US and Europe. Thing is that Napa Valley is half a day's drive at the most from San Francisco, so it pulls from the SF tourist traffic. Virginia's wine country is a half day trip out of DC -- and the Virginia wines are bad for the most part. Tuscany and Bourdeux are part of traveling to Italy or France. I don't hear of wine tours in Australia or Chile. Wine's also a much higher end product with lots of mythology that is actually apparently so much b.s.(terroir appears to be self-hypnosis), but it attracts the punters.
I'm a bit dubious about trying to create a coffee tourism out of the analogy to the wine country tours. I know of some people who are tea gypsies in China, and green tea is one thing that is significantly better fresh. Certain Chinese tea people thought they were going to get rich off aged pu'erhs, but that market collapsed. There is some tea tourism, but not a lot about it in English (http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/17559/3/Tea_Tourism.pdf ). And Chinese tea has a lot longer cultural history than does coffee in Nicaragua, more special tools for preparing and drinking it (Xixing tea pots are a special cult item among tea drinkers of a certain sort such as I was).
The local tourist bureau seems to think that just the scenery would be enough. My experience with my friend the birder was that was not a winning strategy for at least some of the population they're trying to attract. And a number of countries down here have excellent coffee (I've heard that one of the best coffees in the world was Jamaican Blue Mountain).
People do tour the cigar factories in Esteli, but I rather suspect that fewer tour the fields watching people prime tobacco. There's no Ruta deTobacco in Kentucky that I'm aware of, but there's a certain amount of tourism around bourbon, but then the same area has horses, and is near the Kentucky Derby, so there are other things built in.
I suspect that where the scenery is not particularly unique and there are no real strong cultural attractions, what will matter here are good hotel runners, people who know how to make guests feel particularly comfortable and understood, who create beautiful spaces and serve great food.
Trying to manage tourism at a country level strikes me as trying to manage universities as if professors were interchangeable with equivalent credits. Both are areas where the individual running the hotel (especially small ones) or teaching the class (I had some absolutely world class professors at Columbia and some that simply weren't there for the students) matters in ways that management can't touch. If someone or the general conditions makes me uncomfortable at a hotel, I'm not coming back at least to that hotel. Likewise, universities save money staffing intro classes with adjuncts and TAs, but a third of the students won't finish their degrees because of that decision. TAs are not seasoned teachers; adjuncts are frequently just too cynical.
The woman with the little hotel in Cottonwood Falls was brilliant. Could she teach other people how to be brilliant, too? Maybe. Would she want to? I know given the choice of writing or working with writing students, I'd rather write even things like blog posts. I suspect she'd rather run her hotel.
I've been in four of the hotels in Jinotega, two as a guest, one touring it before it opened, the other visiting a guest. I'm fine with staying at two of the others, rather like them, but I know some of my family would only be comfortable at the luxury hotel. I'm glad it's in town, but I don't know how many Jinotega can support, or even if it can support that one.
Maybe I'm wrong and thousands of people every year will want to see how their coffee is grown. And watch it being roasted only I don't think that gets done here except by folks roasting their own coffee at home.
As for me, I don't have to travel far to see some of the coffee production process. My neighbor's drying coffee out back.
Rebecca Brown
27000 hotel rooms
+ 8000 = 35000 x 365 = 12,775,000 Nights !!!!! If they double the number of tourists to 2,000,000 that stay on average 3 nights, then they are are planning about 53% vacancy rate. that will probably translate into a 70% vacancy rate! they maintain the 1,000,000 roughly (most of whom are either relatives or Mochileros) then they are looking at about 75 to 77% vacancy rate. i am sure someone will correct my numbers with proper statistics...
,
27000 hotel rooms
No Sherif your math is wrong because of the colonialist paradigm of your imperialist mentality. The equation nets out to a 0 % vacancy rate according to the principles of Alba - Caruna accounting.
"Believe, briefly, that two and two equals five. If the state tells you that two and two equals five, how would you disprove it?"
Ouch
You are say I am not Sandanista enough.... When they do their Vacancy stats, government surveyors go to Auto Hotels, that's where they get the additional 27,000 rooms required.
lol
well said mike, but I still say sherif is right and he still want a piece of cooltop lol.
Sherif is not far off...
The Plan ls to have 2.5 million tourists per year by 2020.
...
I plan to be a millionaire and married to Angelique Jolie by 2020.
If it is from a
Business in Nicaragua, you will have to have a good Sandanista Partner like myself, I will run for CPC in 2012.
how about?
a full set of hair? lol, I will be slimmer and 4 inches taller lol. in 20 years that is :-), oh and I will have a dome next to sherif's jeje.
Plans are fun...
Almost as fun as stats. Between the two, we can make up all sorts of stories.
Plan is to build a Cruise Ship Terminal in Playa Manzanillo
(Insert made up crap here)
Stats Show Cruise Ship Business is Increasing
gov't planning...
obama has done so well with the chevy volt, solyndra, light squared, gun running to mexico with fast and furious....
gov't planning sounds like a fabulous idea!
"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'sir' without adding, 'you're making a scene." -Homer J. Simpson
If Nic lowered the gap
between rich and poor, Nicas would have places to go and things to do and not have time to chat with foreigners! They would act just like Ticos.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand