Hotels
LaSource Resort
he 21st century has brought with it a new focus on alternative lifestyles, as a growing cadre of people worldwide seek natural foods, mind-body fusion techniques, and a green outlook on life. Grenada offers a boutique hotel that suits these pursuits to a tee. It’s LaSource Resort, located on the island’s southern tip, nestled against the gentle surf of Pink Gin Beach. On any given day, the guests of LaSource can be found practicing Yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation. The architecture employs natural hardwoods in a lush garden setting. Romantic 4-poster beds adorn many of the rooms. And foods in the resort’s four restaurants serve up a cuisine designed for healthy eating, employing lighter calorie recipes, and lighter textures and natural flavors, according to the hotel’s website, www.theamazingholiday.com. Yet, say the site’s authors, “it is not light food for its own sake. Our aim is to produce great tasting foods.” Ironically, the man most responsible for creating and managing this spiritually oriented environment began his career in a far more concrete field … civil engineering. For that was Leon Taylor’s chosen profession until his father, patriarch of a Grenadian landowning family which once owned the land the airport stands on today, called Leon back to the island to help him develop a particular parcel … one surrounded on three sides by the sea. “The best use of the land that we owned was to build a hotel,” he recalls. “So I came back in my 20s and decided to help him. I got the hotel designed and I built it.” Financing for the hotel came by way of the government’s paying the family for the airport land with bonds—bonds with a shaky credit rating at the time. Taylor used the hotel project as a way to guarantee these instruments. “I knew the only way for the bonds to have value was for me to invest in Grenada so that the economy would grow,” he explains. At first, La Source had 100 rooms. It still does, even after a rebuilding made necessary by Hurricane Ivan in 2005. However Taylor did expand the hostelry’s central facilities so that room count expansion would be easy if and when needed. Taylor maintains that such is not now the case, and the culprit is lack of airline service. Noting that islands like St. Lucia and Barbados have seen vastly increased tourism with the advent of $90 flights from premier U.S. markets, he says that the airlines won’t increase Grenada flights until more
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Portrait by Tony McQuilkin...Leon Taylor Owner of LaSource rooms are available. Conversely, hoteliers won’t build rooms until there are more flights. “It’s a chickenegg situation,” Taylor explains. “But if you build [the rooms], I think it would work. I think Grenadians are capable of operating a 400 room hotel easily. It would certainly provide employment.” Meanwhile, he says, his business is doing as well as expected, given the recession. Occupancy rates are running in the high 80 percent range during high season., with about 40 percent repeat customers. “One couple has been here 22 or 26 times,” he notes. His primary new business driver is referrals. “Guests come here and experience this and go back and tell their friends,” he explains, then adds with a agriculture industries. And his staff of 240, (expandable to 280 with full occupancy,) understands the value LaSource brings to both their livelihood and their nation. In fact, says Taylor, LaSource hosted 6,917 guests last year, who pumped some $16 million into Grenada’s economy. The hotel added over $2 million in taxes and levies. He’d like to see Grenada’s government help build those numbers by assigning land to new hotel projects and then putting in the infrastructure to support those projects, a plan that worked in Mexico. “Then they would call in the investors and say, ‘here’s the site. Al l you have to do is build on it,’” Taylor says. Yet he never sees Grenada as being a mass-market
a special vacation of health and well-being
uniquely tropical analogy, that a stay at his resort is a far superior sales tool than any advertising. “That’s because how can you tell someone what a mango tastes like until they taste it?” he asks rhetorically. “You can tell someone what the benefits are, but you can’t tell them the taste.” To create the proper “taste” for LaSource, Taylor provides a totally premium experience, using top shelf hospitality products instead of house brands, as others use. He purchases all his produce and many other foods from local farmers, highlighting the connection between Grenada’s tourism and destination, due to transportation limitations and the limited skill base of its population. “So it’s kind of self-regulatory,” he explains. Meanwhile, LaSource follows its star by continuing to emphasize its connection to New Age lifestyles, through its self-identification as “the amazing holiday” hotel, a slogan seen almost everytime the hotel’s name appears. “We do have a unique selling process,” explains Leon Taylor, “a special vacation of health and wellbeing. It’s exclusive.”
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