NO BOOM AT THE INN: More than one in 10 Irish hotels may tip into receivership this year, faced with customers who are demanding revenge for the rip-off years. In part one of a new series, KATHY SHERIDANvisits Wineport Lodge in Athlone to see how the sector is coping
DARA CRUISE, general manager of the Ice House, in Ballina, and his wife work an 80-100-hour week. “It’s tough,” he says wearily, a term that echoes around the hotel industry. He happens to be staying in Athlone at the Ice House’s sister hotel, the 30-room Wineport Lodge, for a function. And here, the guests – comfortable retirees, midweek, mid-thirties couples with small babies and a set of grandparents for back-up at weekends – will have made their expectations crystal clear.
They expect to be borne along on a cushion of smiles, solicitousness, lake-shore sunsets, fluffy bathrobes, raindrop showers and sufficient l’Occitane freebies to soak the home bath in verbena for a month.
It’s a buyers’ market, and they know it.
More than 10 per cent of the country’s hotels may tip into receivership this year. The sector is bowed beneath €6 billion in outstanding loans – about €100,000 per hotel room, according to the accountancy firm Horwath Bastow Charleton.
Backstage, the owners, managers and staff stagger on, while the banks and Nama dither about strategy. Front of house, young staff are adapting to a new culture. “I remember when the restaurant was full seven nights a week and you had a jettyful of boats lined up outside. It was never a case of having to sell a room, it was, ‘just book us in’,” says Maeve Lennon, a receptionist.
Then trade fell off a cliff towards the end of 2008. In 2009, business dropped by 15 per cent, then by another 15 per cent last year. The decline continues, though at a slower rate, says Ray Byrne, who owns the Wineport with his wife, Jane English. “Average volume didn’t really drop all that much, but we had to drop our pricing, which means spend is down.” Overall revenue is down by 45 per cent. Dinner was €69 a head in January 2009. A year on, it was €50. Billboards on surrounding roads declare that the Wineport is matching the new 5 per cent VAT reduction with another 5 per cent. Their early-bird dinner is now selling for €20.
In the meantime, the just-book-us-in brigade has at last learned to haggle – in spades – and those who seethed at the rip-offs are exacting revenge. “I remember in January 2009, we had to sit down and discuss the abuse we were getting on the phone,” says Lennon.
“Every phone call felt like an attack,” adds her colleague Ciara Kelly. “Ninety-nine per cent of them would have been along the lines of, ‘Do you know there’s a recession? How can you look at yourselves in the mirror?’ I suppose they want us to justify it to them so they can justify it to themselves.”
“People are far more demanding now,” says Norma Wilson, the hotel’s general manager. “The prices are lower, but they’re expecting more.” She cites a recent teachers’ dinner. “They knew they were getting a really good deal and said so. They had a great night, but next thing they see the billboards and are asking for a 10 per cent reduction.”
People still want their treats. But the two-night stay is down to one; beauty treatments have fallen away. Dinner is just two courses, and few request the Chablis any more.
There mightn’t even be a gin and tonic to start – or an overt one, at any rate. That’s because guests often pack their own bar now. Some arrive with their own slabs of cans and bottles. Nicola and Rachel Igoe, sisters who work in housekeeping, have seen eight or nine crates of red and white wine and champagne in a room. “A lot of people would pile everything from the minibar into the press, then load their own stuff into the minibar.”
“And then it’s all left behind for you,” says Wilson, meaning the empties and glasses and general disarray of room-based drinking sessions. Arguments about wedding corkage are routine. Couples want to bring their own wines – a €5 job from Aldi or their own French special hauled from Le Havre – and can’t understand why corkage exists at all.
AT THE WINEPORT, the bar spend alone at weddings is down by about 20 per cent. The rest of us might cheer on the room swillers, minibars being the spawn of the devil, but it’s a sore point with hotels. Flawless glasses are a given in a high-end establishment, and that requires an endless tedium of hand-rinsing, loading in the machines, polishing and putting away.
And glass-polishing is a risky business. Tonight, Deirdre Keon winds up in AE at 4.30am with a slashed artery, after the glass she was polishing shattered. “Everybody in the business has a story about polishing a glass,” says Byrne. “The glass is still hot from the dishwasher, and you’re rubbing it quite aggressively at both ends. We would break 20 glasses a night.”
Some hotels are fighting back. Wilson recently stayed in one where “there was a little card on a bedroom table, saying if you want glasses or ice, it’ll cost you €10”.
After years of merry growth, broken abruptly by lay-offs and wage cuts, the sense of shock remains palpable. The Wineport owes €7 million to Bank of Scotland. “We would be one of the very few hotels that are managing to service the interest – though not the capital, or not in any meaningful way,” says Byrne. “To do that, we’d need to be back to growth of about 30 per cent of the 45 per cent of the revenue we’ve lost. If you could pay €250,000 a year for four years – which you can’t – that would be €1 million. To pay off the debt in full, you’d need another 24 years after that. But we are paying the interest. I’m not flippant about it.
“We borrowed the bulk of it over the past 10 years. You wouldn’t build this place for what we owe on it; it would probably cost €10 million. At the height of the boom, it would have had a valuation of €12 million. Now it would probably be worth €3.5 million on the open market.”
He pays rates of €20,000, “and that’s perceived as nothing compared to others”. But the controversial Sunday premium rates for staff alone could be costing €30,000 a year, “and that’s before overtime or bank holidays kick in. That could be another €15,000”.
Ray Byrne and fellow hotelier Dara Cruise argue that in their premises, when daily pay is averaged out, staff are getting the premium anyway. Sunday work has become the norm for most people, they insist; walk into any shopping centre and it’s obvious that Sunday is one of the busiest trading days of the week. “To us, it’s the same as Wednesday. It’s a rolling ball,” says Cruise.
GOOD, RELIABLE STAFF are still gold dust. Recently let down abruptly by a placement from an Irish hospitality school, Wilson took on a Lithuanian applicant. “I think emigration has a lot to do with the shortage, but I’d say there’s certainly still a bit of that too-big-for-your-boots thing going on with the Irish.”
Kasia Zwierz, a 28-year-old Polish woman who started at the Wineport five years ago, after a brief spell elsewhere, agrees. “I think the unemployment figures are a bit far-fetched. For example, we’ve never had an Irish person do the wash-up here: we have two Polish girls and a part-time Romanian guy.”
She is intensely loyal to the Wineport, remembering how Wilson minded her when she arrived with little English. They’ve lost perks, such as the staff VHI, but people such as her, says Kasia, didn’t have to take a wage cut, unlike management.
“Everybody is contributing to keeping the place going. There is definitely more overtime and split shifts. You may do bar or restaurant work, or go on the desk and take phone calls. But it’s good: it gives you a little bit of power. You’re getting more and more out of it.”
Multitasking is the term du jour. “We’ve made two or three redundancies and would have looked at every aspect,” says Byrne. “The porter might clear a few smudges on the windows. The florist who was costing €10,000 a year had to go, and Celine, who organises the weddings, now does a lot of the flowers, as well as a couple of breakfasts a week. The payroll used to be farmed out to an accountant’s office; now Jane does it herself.” And on quiet nights the couple do their share of the night- portering.
Celine Kelly, the hotel’s wedding organiser, says she can do a flower in a fishbowl for the cost of the flower: “€4 against the €20 we used to pay”. She saved another €10,000 by hiring less luxurious table linen: €7.50 for a tablecloth against the previous €20. “Once it’s covered in knives and forks and all the rest, who notices?”
Unlike hotels that live or die by weddings, the Wineport’s share has fallen by half in two years. “We purposely didn’t chase the market over the past three years,” Byrne says. “It’s a race to the bottom. We’ve reduced our prices, but not to the extent that others have. You can get a wedding now in good places for €50 a head, with wine and canapes and afters.”
Kelly recalls the high days between 2006 and 2008 when they had as many as 11 weddings a month, invariably two or three-night blow-outs. “There was the Vera Wang dress and the Jimmy Choo shoes and then the Jimmy Choo pumps to wear down to breakfast the day after. Now it’s strictly a one-dayer. Never again will we have a Saturday night full” after a Friday wedding, she says.
Couples are back to paying for their own weddings. Kelly can think of only one where the father is paying this year. Hire cars are almost a thing of the past. The table favours – crystal-top corkscrews, fancy chocolates and candles – are a mad memory. The wedding cake may be a Mammy special or from Marks Spencer. The flowers for an upcoming wedding will be arranged in jam jars.
Ray Byrne has high hopes for the civil-marriage market – more specifically, gay civil partnerships. They've just spent nearly €3,000 "softening" the Harbour Room wall with pale voile curtains, making it a suitably romantic, ceremonial room. "The big buzz in the industry is about [the Ireland AMpresenter] Alan Hughes, who's just announced his engagement and where he's getting married. Or [Mark Feehily,] the guy from Westlife. He hasn't set a date, so everyone's buzzed up about that."
It emerges that the highly energetic Byrne has a finger in several pies, aside from the RTÉ series The Restaurant having been filmed at Wineport. A management company he established seven years ago to work with new pub and hotel investors has moved into insolvency management. He now manages Café en Seine, Howl at the Moon, the George and the Plaza Hotel in Dublin for the banks. He also has an investment in the Ice House and the Phoenicia Hotel in Malta.
On the one hand, he’s fairly optimistic. “The good news is that people haven’t given up drinking and going away, so when the upturn comes, chances are they’ll get lazy again and stop getting the drink in Aldi and start buying it from the minibar again.” On the other, he’s not. “To me, it’s important not to make a plan, because everything is in such flux. But I do think this country is f****d.”
A guest wanders past. Niamh Kelly, a community youth worker with Extern Ireland, and her husband, Dermot, self-employed in the services industry, come here about twice a year. “It’s our escape, our definite treat,” she says. They have flexibility on Mondays, so they go for the Wineport’s Slowdown Sunday package, which entails arrival on Sunday afternoon to home-made cookies in the room, a couple of mojitos for her and pints for him, and a few games of cards before dinner, which can be delivered to their lake-view bedroom. Then a DVD and popcorn arrive. After a late, leisurely breakfast on Monday, they’re packed off with a latte and warm scones. All for €195 for two, “no hidden extras, no catch”, she says, apart from the drinks. The room would most likely be empty on a Sunday night anyway, as are most hotels. It’s win-win. Whether the Wineport can sustain it is a whole other story.
