Ms. Alice Bowman

Ms Alice Bowman has been the overall Operations Manager at the Pelican Beach Resort in Dangriga for forty years.  While it was her father-in-law, HTA Bowman Sr., who first conceived the idea of developing and opening a hotel in the then Stann Creek Town, it was Alice and her husband, the late Henry Bowman Jr. who took over the management of the motel on April Fool’s Day in 1971 (a well-chosen date to celebrate the institution’s inauguration considering that many people had dismissed the proposal as preposterous, because who in the world would want to visit a motel, isolated from the main town, which in itself was isolated from the rest of Belize, and crucially from the rest of the world?).  But it was a time when local people were having to seek new opportunities to maintain themselves in Belize, where the farming industries were changing and modernising, leaving many people little opportunity but to emigrate to the United States in search of agricultural work. 

The Pelican Beach Motel, with ten rooms, and full catering facilities, opened in part to try to create some stable employment for the townsfolk; it later changed names to Pelican Beach Resort, but since that day over 40 years ago, it has never closed (except for two short periods, both when the property was evacuated due to Hurricanes Greta (1978) and Mitch (1998)).  From the day Alice and her husband began running the hotel, having brought their three children with them to stay on top of all the confusion and stresses of opening a new and innovative business, she has been a key player in the make or break of Dangriga Town.  In charge of the day-to-day maintenance of the property and equipment, and also the Front End Staff, Alice has had her work cut out for her.  She has been responsible for the training of every single employee they have used within the hotel itself since its inception.  And perhaps the reason she has been so successful at what she does is because it is obvious within minutes of meeting her that she is definitively a philanthropist.  She states that training new employees is a high energy-consuming practice, and something which she has perfected to ensure that visitors are guaranteed to be greeted by a welcoming, proficient and professional body of staff.  And yet she is not ignorant to the fact that the majority of her trainees are merely seeking an ‘Alice Bowman’-level of training, knowing that they will receive one of the best foundations available in Belize in order to progress through the tourist and service industry throughout the world.

As incredible as it sounds, she knows that most of the young applicants who approach her looking for work (often with very poor levels of education and qualifications on arrival) will merely improve their chances to move on and gain other work elsewhere once their period of training is complete.  And those employees who eventually leave her company to open their own businesses (whether rival competitors in the same local industry, or other enterprises) are greeted with empathy and understanding by Alice, who claims that it is unbelievably rewarding to see people who she has trained make it successfully in their own businesses.  There is none of the jealousy or bitterness that so many employers seem to suffer when they part ways with their staff. 

As the tourist industry in Southern Belize has developed, Alice has kept ahead of the changing technologies, and has been commended on her impeccable computerized system of accounts and records.  And she has also been gifted with the wisdom of foresight, in that she began offering her clientele access to local tours long before it was common-place for hotels to offer such a service – be it to the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, the Serpon Sugar Mill, the Gulisi Museum, the highlights of the Garifuna celebrations or various Cayes (including South Water Caye where Pelican Pouch is a relatively recent addition to the Pelican empire!).  Recently, she also prompted the creation of a large conference room and facilities of sufficient size to fully cater for 175 attendees at the Dangriga site. 

Through tragedy and personal loss in her life, Alice has been the rock upon which the Pelican Beach Resort has grown its roots, and it is during difficult and trying times that the true value of a person can be seen, because not only did she persevere and not give up, but she also grew in strength from the support of her staff – who surely would not have so readily offered over and above their job description if they didn’t hold a strong and unfaltering respect for their employer. 

The Pelican group looks set to continue at full steam ahead, and while Alice is nowhere near emotionally ready to retire (despite surely deserving a bit of time for herself!), the development of Dangriga will most probably continue upon the same path, in part thanks to the attraction that the Pelican Beach Resort offers visitors.  And soon to be entering into the fourth generation of Bowmans that turn their hand to different aspects of the hotel industry, let’s hope that Alice’s genes have been passed down the generations to ensure continued success of the business.