City North Hotel opening its doors with confidence
City North Hotel in Gormanston reopened its doors on Monday to new government restrictions imposed on the hospitality sector due to COVID-19, but despite recent hardship, there was a sense of optimism in the air.
General Manager Ciaran O’Donovan was relieved to report a steady flow of new bookings, as members of the public rushed to escape lockdown fever and treat themselves to a night away from home.
Speaking on the eve of the reopening of the hotel, Ciaran explained some of the measures he had implemented to ensure guests had a pleasant and enjoyable stay.
He explained: ‘We’ll be open 7am Monday morning; we’re all in today, but we’ve been in and out of the hotel for the past three weeks and we have a huge amount of groundwork and preparations. We’re lucky here that we have large spaces in our lobby area and our function rooms and our bars, and we’re able to control the direction of traffic of people in one door and out other doors to avoid crossover.
‘Everything has to be washed, and there’s going to be more of a management presence on the ground floor and it will be kind of directing people, ‘you come in this way, these are the lifts, this is the toilet etc...’, but people have to use their own common sense as well.’
Ciaran said: ‘It’s just really a new world, it’s like opening a new hotel in a different country, but staff have all had proper induction with regard to the whole Covid and also for food and beverage service, so it’s really retraining your staff and what they can and can’t do, and I suppose the staff working with the PPE and the protocol of washing their hands.’
Ciaran said he hoped the food and beverage part of the business would be busy, but he remained confident for business overall as many other places would remain closed this week. The fact, he said, that there was now football on every evening, ‘ lads will want to come out for a pint.’
Expecting the hotel to be ‘very busy’ in its first week of opening, he said the phones were already ringing constantly with potential guests.
Ciaran said he will not be increasing hotel prices at City North Hotel, but instead will be offering competitive package deals, as he is ‘not interested’ in engaging in a ‘race to the bottom’ with other hotels.
It will be a case, he added, of ‘ more on offer for the same price.’