Now set date for hotels to open, begs tourism chief
HUNDREDS of Scots hotels will go under if lockdown restrictions are not eased by the summer, tourism chiefs have warned.
Stephen Leckie, chairman for trade body the Scottish Tourism Alliance, fears businesses will ‘fall to their knees and fail’ if ministers do not act.
He has demanded that a date be set for when guest accommodations, particularly those in rural areas, can reopen.
The tourism sector has been able to access a hardship fund set up by the Scottish Government as part of a wider £2.3billion rescue package for small businesses and the self-employed.
But Mr Leckie, owner of the Crieff Hydro Hotel, Perthshire, said the industry’s survival will be dependent on ‘volume trade’.
‘We have spent the last two months planning to reopen – we are keen to reopen and we are ready to reopen,’ Mr Leckie told BBC News. ‘However, in order for tourism businesses to be viable, we have to be in volume trade. We have to look at the viability of businesses and many businesses, if they can’t open by summertime, quite simply, they will fall to their knees and fail.
‘Without the government support and the bank support, which we are grateful for, we would have failed already. However, many of us are going seriously into debt.
‘Each month we lose hundreds of thousands of pounds, so the sooner we can open in some form and get some revenue in the better. We know the demand’s there, we are ready for it. We are practising safe hygienic practices anyway in this industry and we need advice from the government on PPE and other measures that we can take to protect our customers and our people on return to work.’
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s four-stage roadmap to lifting lockdown, published yesterday, has hotel reopenings in phase 3 of her plan, along with cinemas, libraries, gyms, pubs and restaurants, and hair salons. No specific date has been set for the revival of the tourism industry.
Many hoteliers have already had an influx of advance bookings since lockdown measures were eased in England last week.
Mr Leckie said the Crieff Hydro family of hotels took £65,000 worth of bookings last week for slots over the rest of the year – with 50 per cent of self-catering accommodation already sold out for July.
He added: ‘There’s huge demand for folk wanting to visit Scotland, so what we’re looking for from the First Minister is not only the roadmap but also dates of when can we actually start to open our businesses in some viable way.’
But epidemiologist Dr Rowland Kao, of Edinburgh University, advises against setting a date, because areas with limited health resources could be overwhelmed.
He said: ‘It’s a very tricky balancing act to maintain. In the Highland and Islands, you’ve got that combination of the importance of tourism but also the distance and the fact the availability of intensive care is quite far away.’
He added: ‘It’s really important that people understand what is going to happen, but when is going to be a lot more difficult, the reason being no matter how much we try to predict what will happen, we don’t know what the impact is going to be on disease rise.
‘What we need to do is evaluate at each step whether it’s sensible to move to the next step.
‘Academically speaking, choosing ahead of time when you are going to change these things is not a good idea.’