I was on the cruise and attended the presentation... Here are the notes I took:


Okay - so I'm gonna take a stab at this... there was a ton of information presented this morning. The couple who did the presentation own #21.

So... I'll start with the good news:

The owners definitely want to rebuild/reopen as do the Hotel corp. So both parties are on the same page.
They have had a full engineering assessment done of the structures still on site.
They do have an Insurance advocate (required in France)
They do have insurance adjusters.

I say 'they' to those above because the Club O we all know and love it two separate legal entities... The HOA (owners), and the Hotel (Orient Beach Club). OBC owns about 25% of the units as well as the infrastructure, Papagayos, Perch, Boutique..... Dealing with two different groups has made this more troublesome.

So.... a full 60% of the rooms on site were either destroyed or damaged to the point where they need to come down. The other 40% have been deemed structurally stable - those are the Delux Mini suites and the Garden Chalets (mostly). Of the infrastructure, the office and boutique building are salvagable. The utilities are a huge question mark... They are trying to decide if it would be best to repair them (water, sewer and power) or pay to hook up to the municipal support. Interesting wrinkle here.. if they go municipal, then a hidden cost is hot water - seems they were getting all their hot water by using the generators waste heat. I thought that was interesting.
Just yesterday they voted on and agreed to let the first contract - $200k just to remove debris. That does not include demo of any kind...just to clean up what is laying around. FYI - most of the wooden units are over by the Butteryfly farm - they had aerial pictures...
Beyond that they are developing a 4 step plan:
1) have 30 of the surviing rooms ready first. NO TIMELINE yet.
2) bring the remaining 25 surviving units online, along with the office, boutique, Papagayos and the Perch
3) Rebuild remaining units
4) Possible expansion to include a 2 story hotel behind where the message building was.

They said, that there are those that hope to have step one in place by the end of the year, but all believe that is VERY aggressive.

Here are the sticky points:
1) all exeisting buildings will have to be granted a waiver from the new codes, and the new codes are not in place yet.
2) New building plans can not move forward without the new building codes - and France is saying middle to end of next year (2019) for those. Now, they are pushing back on that one...
3) The entire of the Club O's property falls in the newly designated 'high risk' zone - which means both special permission to build, and that insurance will be a trick

The other big hurdle they are dealing with is coming up with a new business plan - they are built today around 110 unit hotel. Step 1 only bring 30 units and step 2 only gets them to half of that... My guess is that was a way of saying that prices will go up....

Officially right now, Club O is operating out of a rental office in Orient Village. They have NO presence on the beach or at the resort at all. The Perch lite that we have all seen and the chairs are all being done by employees on their own. That also means there is no security.

Okay - I think that is all... The room (Comedy lounge on the ship) was packed!!! I would guess 250 or so folks in there. ...most like us are here because we can not be at Club O.

So... there it is.