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Marriott International appoints General Manager for Guyana
Marriott International Inc. yesterday announced that it has appointed a General Manager for the Georgetown Marriott Hotel.
The announcement came through Atlantic Hotel Inc. (AHI).
Marriott International Inc. has appointed Roberto Grisias to be General Manager of the Guyana Marriott Hotel Georgetown and he will assume his new role effective June 1, 2014.
Members of the AHI and Marriott Hotel team paid a courtesy call to President Donald Ramotar yesterday to introduce Grisias. From left: Chairman of AHI, Winston Brassington, President, Donald Ramotar, Roberto Grisias, Company Secretary of AHI, Marcia Nadir -Sharma, and Area Vice President- South America, Rahul Vir.
Roberto began his Marriott career in 1985 as Banquet Manager at the Washington Dulles Renaissance Hotel.
He was Director of Food and Beverage at various Marriott properties spanning fourteen years and in 1999 he was promoted to Director of Operations and then Hotel Manager at the Casa Magna Marriott in Cancun.
Roberto was appointed General Manager in 2002 of the Renaissance Jaragua Hotel and Casino in Santo Domingo.
Subsequent General Manager Roles include the JW Marriott Caracas Hotel, and Venezuela Country Manager overseeing the operations of the JW Marriott Caracas, the Marriott Venezuela Playa Grande Hotel and the Renaissance Caracas La Castellana.
He is also the General Manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Aruba where he successfully opened the hotel in 2013.
Roberto brings to the position 29 years of industry experience. During his tenure in Venezuela he was successful in creating a cluster office for Reservations, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Revenue Management and Engineering resulting in increased revenue and maximized profits year after year despite the adverse economic, political, and social conditions of the country.
Over the course of his career Roberto has received several leadership and sales and marketing awards. Most recently, he was awarded a Mustang Award in recognition of his ability to overcome adversity.
Roberto is a graduate of LaSalle Schools, La Paz, Bolivia where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. He is fluent in Spanish and English.
The announcement comes on the heels of a previous one by AHI when it named the Private Investor; a British Virgin Islands registered company, ACE Square Investments Inc.
The project has been mired in controversy ever since its inception and criticism recently resurged given the announcement.
Alliance For Change Leader, Khemraj Ramjattan, recently had scathing remarks for the project and has since called for a forensic audit of all of the local stakeholders including former President Bharrat Jagdeo, Winston Brassington and Dr. Ashni Singh.
According to Ramjattan, US$19.5M that the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited has put in the project is, public monies must not be dealt with by one “who is so inexact with the facts…This kind of conduct must be penalized.”
Ramjattan said, “It is misconduct like this which gives rise to justifiable suspicions that this project will see huge, illegitimate benefits and kickbacks to these local players.”
“What also makes it smell fishy too is that there is no justification for a two-thirds proprietorship for inputting only US$8M when NICIL is inputting US$19.5M… Why this shortchanging of the public for the private?”
He noted, too, that not wanting to be pessimistic, if the fate of the hotel is not as successful as Government is propagandizing; the taxpayers would have made a major loss of a sum which could have been better spent on so many other priority issues.
Ramjattan was adamant that the evidence of successes in the hotel industry is not there, “not from what is happening with Tower Hotel.”
He added, too, “Quite frankly even Princess Hotel is struggling…I just hope its (Marriott) fate is not similar to that other project architectured by Jagdeo, the Skeldon Sugar Factory.”
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