Bishop’s Gate Hotel
Tomorrow, Friday, May 8, is a bank holiday, which would have been a lucrative weekend for the hospitality industry of bars, restaurants and hotels.
But the industry has been in lockdown now for almost seven weeks because of the Coronavirus pandemic.
There are fears that up to half of the businesses in the hospitality industry may never reopen again because of mounting debts they have accrued since lockdown and because social distancing would not be cost effective to unlock their doors to the public.
On Wednesday, the Tourism Recovery Working Group, chaired by Economy Minister Diane Dodds, met and that group is going to make recommendations to help these businesses.
Ciaran O’Neill, who owns the Bishop’s Gate Hotel in Derry, says his industry has been “wiped out overnight”.
“Summer is a critical part for hotels and we have lost that.
“I feel sorry for customers with weddings booked from August to October as they don’t know whether they’re going to happen or not,” Mr O’Neill told BBC Radio Ulster.
“We have furloughed 81 people.
“Our business has been devastated and I think government has been too slow to react.”
Mr O’Neill says he believes that with the right guidance people would still want to visit hotels even if lockdown restrictions were lessened.
“We need to build consumer confidence and to do that we need to give them a road map, so they know what it will be like staying with us.
“We can adhere to social distancing but need clear guidelines from government around social distancing and we need timelines and time to prepare.
“We need to restart the country eventually,” he adds.
The Stormont Executive meets today to discuss how to ease the lockdown restrictions.
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