The 500-room luxury hotel Zemi Miches All-Inclusive Resort, Curio Collection by Hilton, in the destination of Miches will start operations on October 15. This was stated by tourism entrepreneur Frank Elías Rainieri; and on December 11, the Viva Wyndham Resorts chain plans to open the first stage of another hotel, whose phase will have 500 rooms, according to a panel with investors in the framework of Fitur 2024.
Elías Rainieri also announced that the Puntacana Group -which he presides- acquired another property to build two luxury hotels in the destination of El Seibo. For this reason, he considered that it is up to the private sector to make the real estate investments, since the government has already designed the land management plan for the area. He indicated in the panel that had as moderator the editor of Grupo Preferente, Rafael Caballero, that the growth of Punta Cana was not so, because the businessmen did not dare to invest.
“The government is not there to invest in housing; those who are called to invest in housing are us, the businessmen,” he told his peers present at the event. “Let’s not be afraid to invest outside the capital. The country does not end in the capital, and few entrepreneurs have invested in hotel zones,” he added.
He acknowledged that building housing takes time because of permitting, but employees will need them.
The businessman cited two other aspects to consider for the destination in which he has put his money. The first is the El Seibo-Miches connection. “Because today, Miches, as a town, does not have the capacity to have the population necessary to create the jobs that the entire area requires,” he said.
The second is the creation of a center for the study of tourism to begin to prepare the personnel who will be in charge of the service. “These two things are the responsibility of the State,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rafael Blanco Canto, executive vice-president of Viva Wyndham Resorts, anticipated that the tourist development of Miches will generate “tremendous immigration”.
“We have been talking with the planning and land management department of the Ministry of Tourism, that it is very important to plan what I call the ‘Miches todos’. We (the public-private sector) have to create housing, create services, for that population that is going to be moving there,” he said.
He mentioned, by way of example, that when the hotel chain he represents opened hotels in Mexico, in a community of 30,000 inhabitants at the time, the Mexican government began to plan. Today, the area has more than 300,000 people and has developed “in an orderly manner”.
Meanwhile, Salvador Luque, general director of Fuerte Group Hotels -investor in a 1,000-room hotel in Miches-, indicated that it is necessary to think that employees need to live well, with their families, and make a life project, settling in the area.
“That is why they need schools, hospitals, supermarkets; they need a series of services,” he said.
To support the investments, the Minister of Tourism, David Collado, pledged to do “everything possible” to make the development of Miches an urban model of tourism development in the DR.
“To the investors, to the funds, to the banks, I can tell them that they can invest in Miches with complete security,” he said.
Source: Arecoa.com
