A contract with Guyana written in the stars
Ireland-born Shaun McGrath, 61, came to Guyana in 1989 on a two-year contract with the former owner of the Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown. He has since cofounded the Cara Hotels group, a small chain of heritage hotels in Guyana and the Caribbean, and has made an indelible mark in the local hospitality and tourism sectors as a hotelier, restaurateur and tour operator.
“Two years became four years, four years became five years and then (co-founder of Cara Hotels and retired hotelier) Paul Stephenson and I were supposed to be transferred from Guyana and we decided we were going to quit at Forte, so we set up the Cara Hotels in Guyana,” McGrath told Stabroek Weekend.
“I fell in love with Guyana. I fell in love with a Guyanese woman, got married and the rest in history. My contract with Guyana is now 33 years and counting.”
Noting he has lived in Guyana longer than elsewhere, he said, “I came to this country as an
Irishman who grew up on potatoes and I was living on yam fries initially. I didn’t see a potato until about 1991. Many things were sold on the black market. You couldn’t get US dollars. It has been fun watching Guyana develop and I like to think I’ve played a small part in its development through the hospitality and tourism industries. Though my mother and sisters still live in Ireland, I am blessed to have two home countries. Whenever I am in Guyana and I’m going to Ireland, I say I’m going home. When I’m in Ireland and I say I’m going to Guyana, I say I’m going home. I love both of them.
Of tourism, he said, “Tourism is my love and anything I can do to help to develop that sector is important to me because it develops and creates jobs, and it helps the country’s image.”
McGrath and Stephenson found that setting up the Cara Hotels had many challenges. Stephenson, also Irish, was a former chief executive officer of the Guyana Pegasus in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
“We opened the first hotel,
Cara Suites, with 15 rooms in Middle Street, Georgetown in 1995. It was a bit of smoke and mirrors. We had no bar, no restaurant. We cheated the system. Back in those days there were no hotels of quality in Guyana. We did breakfast and introduced what was a ‘dine and sign’ with several restaurants in the city where the guests dined and their bills were charged to the rooms at Cara Suites. We had pizza and Chinese food deliveries, something that had never been done in hotels in Guyana before. It worked very well.” Cara Hotels gave up the management of Cara Suites about a decade ago.
When Stephenson and McGrath ventured out on their own in 1995, the Guyana economy was opening up with Omai Gold Mines in production and the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph company had taken over the telecommunications corporation and the services had improved.
In 1996 Cara Hotels opened Cara Lodge with 14 rooms. It now boasts 34 rooms.
“We had elections issues where visitors were encouraged not to come to Guyana. So it has been peaks and troughs to keep us to keep us going. About 25 per cent of our staff, with whom we opened Cara Lodge, has been with us from the start. Last year we inducted eight more people to our 20 year awards ceremony. Staff turnover is very low which I am proud of because it says a lot about you as an employer and the company.”
It has been checkered for us especially in the last three years obviously because of Covid-19. We are planning a further expansion of the property as the revenue from the oil and gas kicks in.”
Cara Lodge was a quarantine centre for ExxonMobil from early April 2020.
“There were no protocols in existence even at ExxonMobil. We had to develop protocols for check in, check out and servicing of rooms. We created a manual of Covid-19 protocols and that same manual was taken to the Marriott Hotel here and applied to other hotels. Within the first six months of Covid-19, we were the quarantine centre for ExxonMobil. Exxon then moved their centre to a bigger property in November 2020, which in
many ways worked for us because Guyana opened its airport in October 2020 and there were small numbers of traffic. We kept our staff on board. We transported them to and from work to keep them as safely as possible.”
Cara Lodge also offers training to its staff and work study programmes for students from the Carnegie School of Home Economics. “Guyana has been good to us and the company and we try to give back as much as we can. Part of the problem in Guyana is that staff do not have exposure working overseas. That is a challenge in terms of the way the industry is going. It is an issue we are addressing.”
Cara Lodge has won several awards, including for best accommodation and best restaurant
at the annual Guyana Tourism Authority (GTA) awards. McGrath was inducted into the Tourism Hall of Fame for services to the development of tourism in Guyana.
Inherited trait
McGrath, now a naturalized Guyanese, is one of five siblings. His mother and grandmother were caterers, a trait he inherited. “I love to take local ingredients and play with them. In many ways I am actively involved in the menu creation at Cara Lodge which has developed a good name for food over the years. We’ve played quite successfully with local ingredients and put an international spin on them. I love entertaining at home. It relaxes my brain after the office.