The refurbished Fairmont Southampton will launch its beach club and one of its restaurants in July, a representative of the property owner has said.

“The hotel will be open a little later in the year, but it will definitely be open,” Chris Maybury of Westend Properties Ltd said, speaking at the Build Summit at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute.

Hotel developers have previously said they would be opening the hotel in August.

Mr Maybury said the beach club was the most expensive built in Bermuda and the Caribbean.

“I can’t tell you how much it cost, but it was a significant amount of money,” Mr Maybury told The Royal Gazette. “The beach club extends into the area where there were eight tennis courts.”

The new facility will include two restaurants, a dedicated facilities pavilion, bars and a cabana, among other things.

“It will be extraordinary,” he said. “Think South of France.”

The owners had not yet worked out whether the beach club would be membership only or open to the public. “We want to see what the demand is,” Mr Maybury said.

He did not expect the hotel to reach full swing until next year.

“We are getting unbelievable traction with full hotel book outs,” he said. “That means we have got to get ready for it.”

After a near $600 million renovation, the hotel will include 600 rooms and a ballroom that will hold a 1,000 people. Mr Maybury expected there to be a high turnover of 1,000 people, twice a week.

He said the opening of the Fairmont Southampton, after almost six years of closure will have a wide-ranging impact, with a third of people arriving at the LF Wade International Airport headed to his hotel.

Meanwhile, another panellist at the summit, Mac Slauson, owner of Performance Construction — spearheading renovations at the hotel — tied workforce quality directly to how fast the hotel can open.

“The better tradesmen and the better labour you have, the faster the project moves,” Mr Slauson said.

He emphasised that labour is the biggest controllable cost on a project.

Mr Maybury said the reopening of the hotel will unlock investment for other major projects in Bermuda such as the Elbow Beach Hotel. “Investors are looking for success,” he said.

During the panel, Mr Maybury said Bermuda has many “extraordinary” advantages such as its location, beauty and safety — but does a terrible job letting the rest of the world know that.

“It is amazing the number of times we talk to guests in our hotels and they say, why didn’t you tell us about this place?” he said. “And they live in Greenwich, Connecticut, or some other place on the East Coast. They have never heard of Bermuda, but they will go further south to the Caribbean.”

He promised to release more information on the hotel opening, in the coming weeks.

The Bermuda Urban, Infrastructure, Land and Development Summit was a two-day event sponsored by the Urban Development Authority and the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation.