April 2020 Update
Hello hello!
Rebecca here, as usual! It’s 8th April 2020, and I’m sat at the hotel at a bit of a loss with what to do, so I thought I’d write a diary entry… I mean blog entry, of course!
So, we’re a few days away from our 18 month anniversary of owning Galtres Lodge, but unfortunately, to all intents and purposes, we’re currently closed! Everyone is well aware of the Coronavirus situation, and I don’t want to dwell on that too much, but I will give you an overview of where we’re at to-date.
The first year was good, hard as expected, but good. On top of the huge number of jobs that we knew we’d “signed up for”, we had pretty major roadblocks with things such as boilers breaking, and discovering that the drains under the building were collapsed! Anyway, all these things were fixed (by us, mainly Chris!), and after our first year things were looking pretty good:
We finally had year-on-year figures and we were seeing a steady progression. Sales were up by around 30-40% each month for November to February, reviews were really lovely, and it was all looking very positive. We’ve (knowingly) invested a lot of our personal savings towards the redecoration and refurbishment that we have been doing, with the goal being for this to start paying us back in year 2.
So, this current situation is a bit of a bummer! Obviously, the restaurant is closed following government guidance. The hotel is still technically open, but none of our guests travel for essential reasons, so everyone has cancelled or postponed, meaning that the bedrooms are empty too.
Chris and I are trying to use the opportunity of an empty hotel and restaurant to get the bigger refurbishment jobs done without having to worry about those pesky staff or guests!
I’ll update more on that at a later date, but for now we hope everyone is safe and well.
Rebecca X