TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands For Little Dix Fans

Closing up for awhile. http://www.bviplatinum.com/news.php?articleId=1452878535

18 months is a long time. Employees will be hurting big time.
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That's disturbing . We live on the backside of the hill from Little Dix. Haven't seen any drop offs at Savannah bay on days we've been there lately even when swell is down. It makes no sense at all to shut down for 18 months for renovations on such a property. Either Rosewood is in financial trouble or this economy is headed into a ditch or the air fares/times have taken a toll.. The Biras Creek closing could easily be explained by a lease conflict. However Little Dix is much different.
we have a lot of islands friends that work there..this is truly sad.

Hopefully the story is true that they are spending big money on island with 17 months of construction and will be a temporary setback..but I've never heard of a successful resort closing for a year and a half to renovate.

Little Dix has rooms every night starting tonight covering the MLK US Holiday and Valentine's for more than a month at rates from $1,000 to $1,700 per night.

Markets are always changing. One part of today's high end market is shorter mini trips that demand swift and simple ingress and egress. From the get to the STT airport three hours early to the ferry dance debated here over and over. The BVI is limiting itself. Across the water the cruise ships have suddenly started skipping scheduled stops at St. Croix without explanation.

The Rosewood's holding company is in great shape. Other resorts have been redeveloped into residences or villas along the lines of Peter and Oil Nut.

Rosewood Holding Parent

Here is a link to Rosewood. They seem to be in fine shape.
Rosewood Link

In December, I spoke to a senior Rosewood person who is associated with another property. He told me then that LDB would be closing for renovations. I don't recall him mentioning the duration of the project. I separately spoke to someone else who has been going to LDB for decades and she mentioned that the LDB facilities were "getting tired".

It seems typical for luxury resorts to close for an extended period of time, occasionally. Although they would never admit it, they seize the opportunity to 'purge' the staff of bad apples that could never be dismissed under current labor laws and retrain new staff - who are initially super grateful for their jobs.

And renovations can be done with no considerations for guests.

The successful luxury resort model, such as LDB, Caneel Bay and Peter Island can survive an extensive closure, and thrive when they reopen. Resorts like the BEYC need the cash flow and must do the same during their brief seasonal closure, and throughout the off season.

Usually the luxury resorts rely upon phoney-baloney 'extensive damage' caused by a tropical storm or a brush with a hurricane (a few coconut palms fell over) to inspire their closure.

There wasn't the convenience of that this year.

Unfortunately it appears they are "firing" the 300 employees with no benefits except for the very long term people. This will have a significant impact on everyone on Vg.

absolutely.. it is horrific on such a small island to purge folks . Ironically sevral of the people that work there are first and second generations of land owners who sold to Rockafeller who started Little Dix If you look on the hills froom North Sound Road from Speedy's turn you will see the houses of the family that once owned Little Dix property--Speedy and his family's houses are up there. I have a great friend who works on the dock at VGYH whose entire family works at LDB---and lives on that hill and is a part of the family that sold to Rocefeller. This is not an island that can stand 300 layoffs to get rid of a few folks they don't like. Very sad

Couple of things. The BVI has some fairly strong labor laws concerning layoffs. I would assume there will be some sort of severance package. The other is they will need workers back when they reopen and with the work permit red tape there is a limited labor pool on VG so they will have to rehire most of them.