The Tribune

By FELICITY DARVILLE

ANDREW “Andy” Ingraham is in a league of his own. A Bahamian born in Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera and bred in Bain Town, he is known around the world as a leader in creating ownership for blacks and minorities in the hotel industry. He is a successful businessman with a unique flair for networking and connecting people in ways they may have never envisioned and continues to create more and more scholarship opportunities for young Bahamians to become educated and see the world as their oyster.

 He is not one who has left the country, looks back and complains of how backward it is. He sees the future and he knows if that vision of the future is to come true, it can only happen if he and others work towards it.

“Our vision for The Bahamas is... how do we open up The Bahamas more to the tourism market?” he told me.

“We have got to think beyond Nassau and Freeport. We have got to give people an opportunity to become owners. We have to develop programmes to take people from just having a job (now having a job is good) but we have to help people who want to become owners to be able to go to the next level.”

 Andy has proven it’s not just a dream, it’s a reality he is living. Back in 2001, he got together a few of his friends and encouraged them to invest with him in owning hotels. He met with a Mr Hollyfield, a black man and owner of a Best Western in Memphis, Tennessee. He spoke to him about what he was doing and how he did it.

With that inspiration, he approached his friends and encouraged them to join him on a quest to change the face of hotel ownership in the region.

They started with a small, branded hotel in Fort Lauderdale. From there, the group began partnering with major brands like the Hilton and Marriott, and kept building upon one success to create another. Today, they own just over a thousand hotels as a group.

“In the next five years, we will probably double what we have,” he said.

“In the next ten years, we will probably be the largest minority group in the United States as owners of hotel rooms. For us, ownership is important. We can make decisions, and it becomes clear that we stop begging and start demanding.”

 He believes the black and minority tourism market is also overlooked, and huge opportunities for countries like The Bahamas are being missed unless more attention is paid. As founder of the National Association of Black Hotel Owners and Developers (NABHOOD), he has watched the trends from 1995, when African Americans were spending about $30 billion a year to travel. NABHOOD’s latest study, done in 2019, showed this group is now spending $107.4 billion in travel.

These and other opportunities will be discussed at the 25th Annual International African American Hotel Ownership and Investment Summit and Trade Show, hosted by NABHOOD. The event will take place October 8 - 10 at Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay Hotel under the theme: “Gaining Economic Power through Multicultural Tourism”. The summit is intended to empower urban and rural communities to become self-sufficient through the development and marketing of heritage and multicultural tourism. Attendees will be educated on how to gain a share of this $100 billion market.

The Bahamas won’t be left out. Simultaneously, the first annual Bahamian Diaspora Summit will be launched at the same venue in a separate convention. Attendees will not only be able to hear of investment opportunities on the America mainland, but in The Bahamas as well.

Andy explains his inspiration for his brainchild: “We want to bring Bahamians together from all over the diaspora to come up with a plan of nation building, investing, and giving back to The Bahamas, through avenues such as scholarships and direct investment. We want to utilise the talent that has left home and, through networking, bringing the talent back to be utilised at home.

The Bahamas Ministries of Tourism and Finance will take part. In cultural areas, we are talking to Percy “Vola” Francis; in Music - Fred Ferguson and Julien Believe; and in business, Fred Perpall... our grandfathers lived four doors apart in Bain Town.”

That’s the place where his visions of being great and making great strides in life all started.

He grew up in Oakes Field on Hawthorne Street. Arlington and Doris Ingraham were his parents and he has three brothers and two sisters.

His father was a firefighter and his mother, a hairdresser at a beauty salon at the corner of Robinson Road and Minnie Street.

There in Bain Town, he had lots of great influences. His grandparents Ralph and Mabel Spence owned a small store on West Street, Bain Town. He spent much of his time during his formative years at their home and at the shop, and watched how they shared so freely and gave to the community at large. His spirit of entrepreneurship was also inspired by his grandfather, Wilberforce Ingraham of Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera.

He attended Oakes Field Primary and later was sent to boarding school in Eleuthera. His journey in tertiary education began at the West Indies College. Initially, Andy thought he would study law and come back to the Bahamas. He chuckled as he joked and told me that he thought he would be prime minister one day, but instead, Hubert Ingraham fulfilled that dream. He went on to study business administration at Florida International University and with a strong business acumen, island-bred morals and principles and excellent fortitude, he found a way to rise to the top in his endeavours.

 “Having grown up in The Bahamas and Jamaica, I saw the vast opportunities that America had to offer,” he said.

“There were endless possibilities. I worked for a number of years at AT&T, but then I decided that entrepreneurship was great. I started getting involved in the tourism industry, particularly out of a curious concern about hotel ownership for multicultural people. Coming from a predominantly black country, I thought that we had a great affinity to work... but what about ownership.”

Andy has proven that it is possible to invest with friends: “I am lucky to have a group of men and women who are brave enough to ask, ‘How do we do business without friends?’ You have to spend time meeting, networking, and talking to people... seeing if that energy level is the same. We have some wins and victories, and it encourages me to do more.”

His entrepreneurial spirit is vast. He has a great legacy to stand on. His father migrated to Florida and became the owner of the popular restaurant Bahamian Connection.

He watched his father manage to bless many families with food while maintaining a successful business. Decades later, Andy and his siblings have come together to own that entire block where his father’s restaurant stood, in the Design District in Miami, with major plans underway to develop the block into several businesses.

Andy is involved in the media business, and is even active in political relations, working to connect politicians to community leaders in meaningful ways for change. He is the owner of Horizons International Group. His children are continuing in the entrepreneurial spirit and are successes in their own right.

He is father to Shimado, Hasan, PJ, Lisa and Nakia, who owns Nakia Ingraham Funeral Home in Pembroke Pines. He has great support from his wife, Maria, his confiante and inspiration to continue to dream bigger.

 All the while, Andy has not forgotten the younger generation. He is the chair of the CA Smith Foundation, which is providing scholarships to Bahamian students in areas focused on nation building. He also works with William Bill Pickard, who is the Bahamian Consul General in Detroit and great philanthropist with a drive to educate as many youngsters as he can. Most recently, Andy was in Nassau on the inaugural flight of Tropic Ocean Airways, which began a schedule of four flights a week from Fort Lauderdale’s Sheltair terminal to Nassau’s Odyssey Aviation. He introduced Tropic Ocean Airways’ CEO Rob Ceravolo to three students whom he recently assisted in gaining scholarships in aviation in the United States: Kaidem McCartney, Shakhori Rose and Akil Rose.

Just this month, Andy received an Honorary Doctor of Business degree from the President of Northern Caribbean University Dr Lincoln Edwards. The university conferred the degree during its 2021 graduation exercise on August 8 in Jamaica.

He was lauded for his “monumental achievement in the symbiotic fields of multicultural tourism, hotel investment and the travel industry as well as African American heritage, particularly in North America, the Bahamas and the wider Caribbean”.

Andy has worked closely with Ministers of Tourism throughout the Caribbean, connecting them to the American and global market, and is doing so with Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar today. He once worked for a few years with the Dutch government, helping to revolutionise the tourism product in St Maarten. He also works closely with tourism officials and executives in Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Anguilla and many other Caribbean countries.

In his remarks to the graduating class, Andy said: “Don’t be afraid to take risks. If you fail, start again.”

Tourism, he told me, is not only the number one industry in The Bahamas, but it is second to healthcare in the United States. Therefore, it is a “cash cow” and one that Bahamians need to take a closer look at through the lens of ownership and entrepreneurship. You have to have the intestinal fortitude, the drive, and find the right people. He said that one can start small like he and his friends did, because “the more success we have as individuals, the more success you will have as a group”.