Packaged Vacations: Tourism Development in the Spanish Caribbean

4. Dorado Beach

4 Dorado Beach The Puerto Rican government, through PRIDCO, was not only the first Latin political entity to develop a strategy for state-directed tourism development in the mid-1940s but also the most likely to involve American hotel companies in its projects. While the Caribé Hilton was the first state-sponsored hotel, Laurance Rockefeller’s decentralized Dorado Beach resort community , located some twenty-five miles to the west of San Juan and opened in 1958, represented the first Puerto Rican attempt to approach tourism development through a low-density approach. Nevertheless, in 1967 Rockefeller agreed to sell 80 percent of his Dorado Beach Resort to Eastern Airlines, along with a 40 percent stake in the RockResorts chain of decentralized, low-density hotels located in the continental United States, Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. This decision placed Rockefeller in a close relationship with a corporation possessing the capital to expand the resort property, which already included two Robert Trent Jones Sr. golf courses, approximately thirty residential home lots, and a golf clubhouse, but it was also driven by the need for short-term profits. Additional investment capital could provide additional golf courses, condominiums, and a new convention hotel to complement the original Dorado Beach Hotel. For Eastern Airlines, under the leadership of Floyd Hall, Dorado Beach fit into the airline’s plans to diversify revenue streams through tourism development in the Caribbean . The danger, however, lay in Eastern’s inexperience with tourism development and its unrealistic expectations for quick returns on investments. 56 The Latin Caribbean For Rockefeller and RockResorts, the danger in the alliance lay in the possibility of transforming a low-density project into a higher-density resort with a split personality. Ironically, no one understood the implications of this merger—for either RockResorts or Eastern Airlines—better than outsider Paul S. Weber, president of Almar International, a construction equipment company based in Wyckoff, New Jersey. Weber had been a highly satisfied customer of the Dorado Beach Hotel, with no apparent professional connections to either Eastern or RockResorts. His correspondence with Floyd Hall, however, was almost prophetic in regard to the impact Eastern’s merger would have on the resort property. Weber boldly wrote to Hall on September 29, 1967, in the wake of the merger announcement: It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I read in the NY Times yesterday of the purchase of 80% interest in the Dorado Beach Hotel by Eastern Airlines. I notice that no changes are planned, the present management [RockResorts] will continue to operate, etc. But somewhere along the line your board of directors will decide that the operation is not sufficiently profitable. The physical plant will have to be expanded, the services and facilities downgraded, package tours arranged—and the Dorado Beach becomes just another Miami or San Juan Beach Front. I can only hope my wife and I can go back one more time before these changes occur. Places with the charm and serenity of the Dorado Beach are fast disappearing, and just as good money is driven out by bad money, quality gives way to quantity.1 A week later, on October 3, 1967, Hall defended his company’s acquisition with a cordially tepid reply. Perhaps missing the point of Weber’s letter in regard to the resort’s environmental sustainability, Hall noted, “I can assure you that it is profitable and that it has every expectation for continuing profitability in the future. Had this not been so, we at Eastern Airlines would not have invested in it.” Hall also defended RockResorts’ and Eastern’s ability to preserve RockResorts’ charm, but within the context of future profitability (something Weber had warned against in his initial letter). “It is our intention to preserve those qualities indefinitely,” Hall concluded, “for we believe there is a growing number of people who appreciate the finer things and I see no reason why quantity must displace quality.”2 In a final response, Weber reiterated that the issue at stake had less to do with who managed the 57 Dorado Beach property than with the principles that governed a resort’s management, be they either those of sustainable tourism or mass tourism: I am quite sure the Dorado Beach is a profitable operation (it was certainly doing a capacity business when I was there). My point was that when an operation is profitable there is a tendency to try...