Barbados lends St. Brelade's Bay a helping hand

Saturday 12 June 2021

St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel is welcoming some new faces all the way from Barbados for the summer season to help plug the hospitality shortages the island has been facing.

Eight workers from the Lone Star Boutique Hotel and Restaurant on the eastern Caribbean island have come to the island to help out in what is looking likely to be a busy summer.

As they share the same owner in Jayne Best - daughter of Wigan Athletic owner Dave Whelan - it was decided between the hotels that four waiters and four chefs would be sent from Barbados to Jersey for 12 to 16 weeks until September.

Talking about the new arrangement, St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel General Manager Thomas Stene told Express that it came about as the Jersey is “going into high season while [Lone Star] are going to low season.”

It comes as hospitality bosses are reporting increasing difficulties in finding workers after Brexit and covid, which has depleted the island of its usual seasonal staff from Europe.

Mr Stene echoed this, pointing to the more than 200 vacancies currently on the Government's job search page, and explaining that the hotel does “not get a lot of applications from local Jersey residents”, even though they would like to.

Video: Lone Star General Manager Kristin Boland tells a Barbados TV station about how the arrangement came about. 

However, both Lone Star and St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel say this new opportunity will offer benefits to both sides, giving the Jersey hotel the staff they need, and the Barbados staff a brand new experience.

“It’s for two reasons - first of all, they work for the same owner, so it gives them an opportunity to have them work in their sister hotel,” Mr Stene said.

“And then it also gives them an opportunity to stay in a different environment and to live somewhere else.”

The timing worked equally well for the Lone Star, as its General Manager, Kristin Boland explained: “The Lone Star’s been around for 22 years… so we’ve had a lot of long-standing staff we’ve chosen retained during this difficult time.

“I am quite overstaffed at the moment, and we just thought – let’s be smart about this.”

The offer was then put out to staff to apply to visit Jersey, before Kristin chose eight that she thought would benefit from the experience.

Pictured: St. Brelade's Bay Hotel will have the staff from Barbados work there for 12 to 16 weeks, covid restrictions depending.

The staff are now on-island, having completed six days of quarantine so far – Ms Boland said that the link also worked well as they often share some of the same clientele.

“It’s great because a lot of our clientele are frequent visitors or have a home in Jersey as well, so they know a lot of our staff,” she said.

One of the bartenders had even texted her saying he’d had people who knew him from Barbados come and wave at him from his balcony while he isolated.

Looking to the summer season, Mr Stene added that bookings are looking “fantastically good”, with July and August fully booked, and September equally promising.

Though he said this figure would depend on how many regions in the UK go red and potentially cause cancellations, he remained hopeful that if things stayed in a similar situation, the hotel could look forward to business as usual.

“If all those bookings materialise, then we can have a normal season,” he said.