Four days af­ter the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel an­nounced in a re­scind­ed so­cial me­dia post that it was mov­ing to es­tab­lish a new pay­ment sys­tem which in­clud­ed no longer ac­cept­ing T&T cur­ren­cy, we have heard noth­ing more from the es­tab­lish­ment about what its re­al in­ten­tions are.

The fall­out from the ini­tial post em­bar­rassed Hy­att in­to re­ply­ing a lit­tle lat­er to say that the mes­sage was pre­ma­ture­ly dis­trib­uted with in­ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion. 

The ho­tel apol­o­gised, say­ing that at this time it would not be im­ple­ment­ing any changes to its pay­ment process.

The prob­lem with Hy­att's apol­o­gy, though, was that it did not fo­cus on the re­al con­cern, as the ho­tel placed more em­pha­sis on cor­rect­ing what the post said about cash­less pay­ment op­tions, in­stead of deal­ing with the is­sues of what type of cash it would be ac­cept­ing, which ini­tial­ly was on­ly US cur­ren­cy and British pound ster­ling.

There is noth­ing un­com­mon with a ho­tel choos­ing to go cash­less, as this has been the trend across the hos­pi­tal­i­ty sec­tor for the last decade.

In fact, pol­i­cy state­ments of sev­er­al Hy­att ho­tels in North Amer­i­ca - in­clud­ing in Chica­go, at the Lost Pines, Texas branch and at the Hy­att Park Ho­tel in Toron­to, Cana­da - have ded­i­cat­ed sec­tions ex­plain­ing the brand's no-cash pol­i­cy to the pub­lic.

Hy­att is not the on­ly brand, as right here in T&T the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre has al­so adopt­ed a no-cash pol­i­cy in some as­pects of its op­er­a­tions. 

Had the Hy­att Re­gency sim­ply an­nounced that its Port-of-Spain branch was go­ing a sim­i­lar route, it would have been in a good po­si­tion to ar­gue a case for the ben­e­fits of cash­less trans­ac­tions, in­clud­ing a re­duced risk of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty on its premis­es, an align­ment with mod­ern and fu­tur­is­tic trends, and faster pro­cess­ing of busi­ness trans­ac­tions.

How­ev­er, in its cor­rec­tion, Hy­att's cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions team ei­ther com­plete­ly missed the mark or de­lib­er­ate­ly chose to steer away from ad­dress­ing the ear­li­er egre­gious sug­ges­tion that the ex­change of T&T notes and coins would be dis­con­tin­ued.

The fact that the Hy­att has, up to now, avoid­ed a di­rect re­sponse to this is baf­fling, giv­en that the Hy­att Re­gency was built with tax­pay­ers' mon­ey and is 100 per cent owned by the peo­ple of T&T through the land­lord, the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T (Ude­cott).

Ude­cott has a con­trac­tu­al agree­ment with the Hy­att In­ter­na­tion­al brand, which is man­ag­ing the ho­tel.

While there are laws and prac­tices in some coun­tries that al­low sell­ers to de­ter­mine what type of cur­ren­cy they may choose to use, they do not ap­ply here, where all gen­uine ban­knotes and coins is­sued by the Cen­tral Bank are le­gal ten­der.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, as Cor­po­ra­tion Sole, has right­ly sought to in­ves­ti­gate the cir­cum­stances be­hind the is­suance of the ini­tial state­ment.

Thank­ful­ly, un­like the Hy­att's, Min­is­ter Im­bert's state­ment ze­roed in on the re­al is­sue af­fect­ing cit­i­zens.

We ea­ger­ly await the Fi­nance Min­is­ter's find­ings and we al­so hope that the Hy­att man­age­ment will give the peo­ple of T&T a de­serv­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion on what in the ini­tial post was in­ac­cu­rate and what the ho­tel's re­al in­ten­tions are on the is­sues of cash trans­ac­tions and cur­ren­cy ex­change.

To have cit­i­zens sus­pect­ing that their mon­ey, which was good enough to build the ho­tel, is now not good enough to be used there, is sim­ply un­ac­cept­able.