General Manager of Glocient Hospitality, the concessionaire of the Ikogosi Warm Springs Resort and Conference Centre in Ekiti State, Lanre Balogun, speaks about how the resort attracts guests of different categories and the investments in the past one year, among others. Charles Ajunwa brings excerpts
Can tell us some of the changes that have taken place at the resort in past one year?
Glocient Hospitality, the operators of Ikogosi Warm Springs Resort, is the hospitality arm of Cavista Holdings. Our goal at Glocient, is to transform moribund tourist attractions in Nigeria into profitable businesses and national treasures. A blueprint of that, is Ikogosi Warm Springs Resort. Ikogosi is better experienced. If you had been here four years ago, Ikogosi was not a place that was habitable. We have done a lot and it will interest you to know that every transformation you see here, are done by Nigerians – Nigerian experts and artisans. No foreign experts. They were done by us because we built capacity over the years. I brought Radisson into Nigeria, and I was with the group for over two decades. That experience of operator-selector, conceptualisation, construction, pre-opening and design, is what we brought in here to transform Ikogosi. Some of you were here last year, there are noticeably improvements. Honestly, these improvements and investments will continue and we continue to upgrade. When you came last year, I’m sure we didn’t have an alternative source of energy. Then we had diesel generator as our backup. Now, we’ve invested close to $200,000 (about N275 million) in renewable energy. This covered the cost of the purchasing and installing the solar panels and other ancillary items such as the building, the AC, cables, chairs, and other things required to support the installation of the solar. This serves us 12 hours every day. The savings we are making with the benchmark of 500KVA is over half a billion in a year. That benchmark was done with our 500KVA generator running for 10 hours savings alone. When we did the financial analysis for one year, as I said, we would be saving over half a billion. That’s huge. That’s the kind of investment we are making in Ikogosi. We have a multi-year concession, and the government is impressed by what we’ve been able to do so far. We have employed over 230 staff, almost 70 per cent of the staff are female and over 60 per cent of them are from Ikogosi community. Government has no business in business but what it can do is to create the enabling environment for businesses like ours to thrive. Kudos to the government of the Ekiti State under the leadership of Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji, they have been very supportive.
