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Playing games helps build hotel tourism drive
Caleta Hotel and other local hotels in the difficult-to-fill and unprofitable January period.
Franco Ostuni, the Italian Caleta hotel manager for the past 15 years, was jointly instrumental in developing the chess festival after visiting the reputedly oldest such event in Hastings. Callaghan remarks: “We found it a very dull affair with nothing for partners and others involved and no women players. We thought we could do better by offering more for everyone involved; we also discriminate by having a female-only tournament with separate prizes and the ability for women to also compete in the general all-comers event.”
The small Gibraltar International Chess Festival he started 13 years ago then attracted 60 players. Now, over a 10-day period ending in early February, the Festival attracts 450 participants staying at hotels locally, and some in Spain. “The Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival has been an extremely successful venture, thanks to local private sponsors and the government,” Callaghan enthuses. “This time, we have people travelling to Gibraltar, paying for their own air fares and accommodation, from 57 countries.”
The festival was voted in 2014 the ‘best in the world’ by the Association of Chess Professionals – votes for 2015 will be cast in March. The Financial Times has already crowned Gibraltar’s Chess Festival “the most prestigious tournament in the world”.
Callaghan doesn’t think the chess festival - that adds some £700,000 direct income to Gibraltar - will get much larger, in part because of the territory’s comparatively small size. “I think it is best that we have something that is prestigious – we are not in the numbers game”, he maintains. “There are more people around the world who know of Gibraltar because of chess than for any other reason”. That claim is being strengthened by this year’s event being featured on Chinese national television and also on major Indian stations, a development that presents a challenging language and time zone opportunity for live TV coverage, he believes.
As Callaghan explains: “When you think of Monaco you think of the motorsport
Continued page 20
Having twice been instrumental in opening up competition in airline services to Gibraltar, Brian Callaghan one of the territory’s leading tourist industry figures believes more can be done by government and industry to increase The Rock’s appeal to holidaymakers and other visitors, finds Ray Spencer
Although in his 76th year, UK Somerset-born Brian Callaghan is showing no signs of winding down his efforts to extend interest in Gibraltar; instead he runs a successful business that has already helped put Gibraltar on the worldwide map and has plans to expand the jurisdiction’s hotel offering and introduce new event-led attractions.
Callaghan was one of the last National Service entrants in the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, and as a subaltern had been posted to Gibraltar for a couple of years.
He was taken by the outdoor life environment. “I spent most of my time on the Upper Rock teaching people how to climb and when it was raining we used to go down the caves, but I was pretty bad at both of those things. I was just trying to teach people to have confidence in themselves,” he says.
It was a chance party invitation that led him to meet Shirley - “a staggeringly beautiful woman, who like all good girls in those days gave me a long hard apprenticeship of 18 months or so here and when I returned to the UK after the forces - trying to persuade her to be a feature in my life - she led me quite a dance” - before he returned to Gibraltar to marry her 53 years ago.
He moved back to the UK with his new wife and joined Unilever at Marple Bridge, near Manchester as a meat buyer, having prior to the Army gained experience six years earlier as a butcher’s boy before progressing into hotel meat supply and slaughterhouses.
More people know Gibraltar through chess - Brian Callaghan.
But Shirley’s father wanted his daughter back in Gibraltar. “It was a momentous decision for me in 1964 to return here and I’m hugely privileged to have lived in this community for so many years”.
The Caleta Palace Hotel (as it was then known) was being built at Catalan Bay on The Rock’s east side by his father-in-law, George Bassadone and Callaghan joined as assistant manager when just 24 years old – with no experience! “I felt a little unsure, but the hotel business really is no different from many others; it’s just a managerial task in that you need to get things done and done well, and see to the detail.”
Initially with 86 bedrooms, the hotel expanded in 1972 by a further 70+ rooms to meet rising demand.
Fewer hotel beds
But Callaghan, normally quiet, shy even, and totally unassuming, is suddenly moved to observe: “One of the failures of successive governments in Gibraltar since the frontier reopened [in 1985 after being closed by Spain’s General Franco for nearly 16 years] has been in relation to tourism. Today, we have fewer hotel beds than we had 20 years ago!”
He has not given an interview on his personal and business interests for more than 40 years, although in 2013 Callaghan received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from the Queen for services to tourism - and to chess.
That game has turned out to be something of a savior for the present-day
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