When Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the phased re-opening of hospitality businesses for June, hotel managers like Niall Coffey breathed a sigh of relief.
Ireland’s tourism and hospitality industries have been the worst hit during the pandemic and previous attempts at re-opening have been upended by fresh surges of Covid-19.
“I think we have no choice but to stay open at this stage because from a financial survival (view), we really need to do it,” said Coffey, who is general manager of Harvey’s Point, a four-star hotel in Donegal in northwest Ireland.
Save for brief re-openings last summer and Christmas, bars, restaurants and hotels have been largely shut since March 2020.
Now, as the vaccination campaign gathers pace, Coffey and others are preparing for June 2 when they can begin allowing some guests back through the doors. Then over the following weeks, bars and restaurants can open up, albeit with restrictions on numbers and guidelines on indoor and outdoor dining.
Des O’Dowd, owner of the Inchydoney Island Lodge & Spa in Cork, said that businesses have shouldered a lot of costs in trying to re-open safely over the last year.
“You try and send back food to suppliers. We’ve closed twice, having to go through fruit and veg and throw it out or try to find a home for that. We’ve been closed and beer has been going off,” he told CNBC.
“It is an expensive process to start and stop and to do that again now would be heart-breaking so I hope that this is it, that we’re opening and there’s no going back.”
The government has since acknowledged that the hospitality and tourism industry, a significant employer in Ireland, will need further stimulus support even after restrictions are lifted. Tourism was worth about 9.3 billion euros ($11.3 billion) to the Irish economy in 2019, with 2 billion euros of tourism-related taxes paid to the exchequer.
Beyond food and supplies, many hotels and bars have needed to invest in refurbishment and equipment to ensure Covid compliance.
“This time last year we were really facing into an unknown. We were going around with tape measures trying to measure two meters and we had to buy a lot of dividers between tables,” O’Dowd said.
Now he said the hotel has a better grasp of what a safe re-opening looks like, including providing antigen testing for the hotel’s 225 employees, adding further costs to re-opening and staying open.
