I always did
the project
management
myself, I was
always very careful
about costs, and
we always received
excellent support
car or another hotel room. If
you don’t have any money, you
work harder to make some.” They
opened Malta Tours; a UK-based
tour operator, to feed their business back home. They went into
insurance, even into manufacturing for a while, making sheepskin coats; and around this time
Winston and Tony took the major
decision to commit to the businesses full-time and cut away the
safety nets of their full-time jobs
they’d both retained up to this
point.
Things went well and after twenty
years in business, while still in his
forties, Winston decided to sell out
to his brother and retire; a state of
affairs which lasted for around six
months as he realised he needed
something to do. So working with
a partner on a 50 – 50 basis, he
went back into the hotel busi-
ness with the purchase of the
Bugibba Holiday Complex. This
certainly gave him something to
do. They gutted the property,
increased the number of beds
from 250 to 1000 and reopened
it as a four star hotel. One year
later they started to do pretty
much the same with the Coastline Hotel, with an outlay of 5
million Maltese lira. “As you can
imagine, we were pretty strapped
for cash at times, but I always did
the project management myself,
I was always very careful about
costs, and we always received excellent support from both from
successive governments and from
the banks. Government realised
that we were doing a lot for the
economy and for jobs, and I’m
sure we wouldn’t have been able
to achieve what we have achieved
without the banks – BoV initially and now HSBC as well –
“None of this would have
been possible for me without the
constant support of my wife Dolores”
INSIDER SPECIAL EDITION
2015
59