He is celebrating 50 years in the hospitality industry, yet Coco Reef owner John Jefferis is showing no signs of slowing down as he announces an expansion of the hotel and the opening of a new restaurant.

Mr Jefferis, who opened the doors to Coco Reef in 2004, is now looking to build 36 new condominiums and ten luxury residential villas on the eastern side of the Paget property.

He has already obtained a special development order and expects that the first villa could be open as soon as February 2016, while he hopes the entire project will be completed within four years.

More imminently will be the completion of a tapas and wine bar, and art gallery a short walk away from the hotel in the old Triminghams building near Modern Mart. He hopes the restaurant, which will carry Caribbean and South American artwork, as well as some local art, will be open by October and could create up to ten new jobs.

Mr Jefferis told The Royal Gazette: “I realised that to make this hotel successful, it needed a residential ingredient — you really need that to make it work. If we build a few of these, people will be excited to buy them. Everything is working in the right direction and we will be reaping rewards in the near future. I have been working on it for about seven years.

“I am talking to the same construction company that built the lobby to the hotel — PMC — and there could be anything from between 80 to 100 construction jobs and a further 45 hotel jobs when it is completed.

“The tapas and wine bar will be called Galleria and it will be attractive for people to have cocktail parties in there.

“The economy is going to get better; usually after a recession, things get better.

“The trends are cyclical. I wouldn’t invest money in something I didn’t think was going to work, so I certainly think there is a market for this sort of thing.”

Mr Jefferis’s first job in the hospitality industry was a stint as a pot cleaner in a fish and chip restaurant in London aged 15.

Some 50 years on, he has gathered many accolades. Moving to Bermuda in 1970, Mr Jefferis took a job at the Belmont Hotel, having completed an internship at London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel. He went on to become the youngest general manager in the hotel’s history before becoming managing director at the Elbow Beach Hotel and Development Company. While there, he instituted the first international toll-free reservation lines and introduced a hotel levy, a controversial move that was followed by the big hotels in Bermuda.

As a past president of the Bermuda Hotel Association, Mr Jefferis was the driving force behind the Island joining the Caribbean Hotel Association, for which he later became president.

In 2003, he acquired the lease for the Stonington Beach Hotel, which he opened in 2004 as Coco Reef, and in 2008 he won the Caribbean World’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Tourism and Travel.

Asked what the most valuable lesson he had learnt in his career, Mr Jefferis said: “You should strive to make every customer feel like a king and feel special.

“It is also important that general managers must meet all the guests; that is our policy.”