‘We have staff who’ve been here over 15 years, Government can’t waste this new lockdown’ – Inchydoney owner
“THERE are people worse off than us,” is Des O’Dowd’s first reaction to the devastating news that the country is heading back into a lockdown. His initial thoughts are with his staff as well as people facing into weeks of isolation, still there is no doubt the owner of Inchydoney Island Lodge and Spa in West Cork faces big challenges of his own.
We speak just ahead of the new Level 5 restrictions. Like thousands of business owners across the country O’Dowd is facing into enforced closure.
“We have been through this, we will come through this again, and we have had amazing support from all our guests, the Irish people have been fantastic,” O’Dowd says, adding that his heart “goes out to people who are isolated, be it in rural or urban locations”.
The Bandon native is keen to stress that while he may be the front of the businesses, it is very much a team effort at the four-star hotel.
“A lot of the staff are here since the day we opened, many are certainly here in excess of 12 or 15 years, they’re great young, local people. In terms of the management of the hotel, they deserve a huge credit,” he says.
Nonetheless, the buck and the bills stop with O’Dowd and this year will go down as one of the worst on record for the hospitality sector, which has been particularly hard hit by Covid-19.
The hotel, which also caters for weddings and Christmas parties, had been looking at “quite a good year, and we literally went in seven or eight days from reading about this thing [Covid] to deciding to close,” he says.
On the day it shut down in March the resort, which has 67 rooms and 15 apartments, had 170 on its payroll.
What kept everyone going during “those quiet four months” were “heart-warming” messages of support from customers.
Since reopening at the end of June – following considerable expenditure on Covid safety measures – the business was busy in the accommodation side of things, according to O’Dowd.
“[But] we were obviously missing wedding and function revenue.”
“We probably do maybe 40 weddings a year. It’s not a central part of our business, but it is an important part still,” he says.
The hotel was looking at having a “decent” October, boosted by staycationers who would normally go abroad for a weekend over the mid-term period.
“So [now there are] huge amount of cancellations again. We are aware that people are in a worse position than we are, it’s difficult times for the whole industry really,” he says.
The Government’s decision to reduce the Vat rate in the tourism sector from 13.5pc to 9pc in Budget 2021 is, according to O’Dowd, an important move to keep Ireland competitive with other European countries that have lower Vat rates.
However, until his hotel can trade again it “is not going to have any impact for us”.
“Businesses, they need revenue to benefit. We are closing down for the next six weeks, realistically we are probably closed until December 27,” O’Dowd says.
“October would be a busy time for us and mid-term would be busy. That would normally get us through to December.
“In a normal year we would often have weddings and Christmas parties, we won’t have any of those this year – at the moment I can’t see demand. I’m not sure people will be getting away two-three weeks before Christmas,” he adds.
In terms of how the Government have responded towards the hospitality industry, O’Dowd is pragmatic.
“It’ll be easy in hindsight to point out what the Government have done wrong, they’ve done a lot right.
“I don’t know how you easily put an economy into hibernation and take it back out again. The difficulty now, I suppose for everybody is, when you have some parts open, and some parts not open, there are winners and losers. And when you’re trying to come up with schemes that are giving out large amounts of money, you will have winners and losers out of that, it’s very, very hard to make it completely fair,” O’Dowd adds.
As we enter another phase of Level 5 restrictions, his message to those in charge is simple.
“Please don’t waste this lockdown. The people who were able to model should have been able to use those models to know how much contact tracing would need to be done,” he says.
“For them to be telling now about how to behave when they didn’t put a contact tracing system in place, that is not the fault of the Government, that is the fault of the people who are advising the Government and they have wasted seven, eight months. The World Health Organisation only recommends a lockdown when you need to use it to get your health system ready to take additional capacity and I think we have wasted that,” he adds.
O’Dowd says there is no reason why viable hotels which have traded profitably for many years will not re-open. “What I would really like to see is that they remain in the ownership that they’re in, and that we don’t go through that process where there was a lot of value given away to funds.”
He first opened Inchydoney Lodge on a lease basis in 1998 – initially with a partner – before buying it outright in 2003.“When we opened up first we had a spa it was probably new, and there was a lot of focus on it. It was very successful and we thought the success in the hotel was all down to the spa.”
After surveying guests, it was in fact the location that was their top draw.
“That was the complete mind-shift for us, that probably was 2009-2010. Since then we’ve put that decision-making prism around everything.
“So if we’re looking at interior design, we try to make any [decision in] context with our location. If we’re looking at recruitment, we like to recruit locally, same for food offerings, everything we do, we try to reinforce back that we are in West Cork, [and] part of the community.”
The hotel has still been voted Ireland’s Leading Spa Resort at the World Travel Awards seven times.
Guests to Inchydoney Lodge are mainly Irish and over the past four years the business has spent “an awful lot of money” trying to attract Americans. “Fortunately, I suppose this year you could say fortunately, it hasn’t worked very well for us,” O’Dowd says.
“The concern was always that we are relying a lot on the Irish domestic market, and [we were] just trying to spread that. It’s not that we don’t appreciate it but [we were] trying to take all the eggs from one basket.”
However, unlike some of the other popular destinations “there isn’t a well-worn path to West Cork”.
“We had somebody over here that had a great week, ate in great restaurants, saw great sites, went kayaking, did surfing, did the whale watching and when they were leaving I said ‘So, are you going to send us a lot of business?’
“And what they said is that it is for the more adventurous independentminded travellers.”
Inchydoney survived the crash and did not go down the route of cutting prices and standards, O’Dowd said.
“We took the view that we have invested a lot in our brand, we had a lot of repeat and recommended guests, and the idea that they would come and it wouldn’t be what they had expected, or what they had experienced previously wasn’t really good,” he says.
Americans see West Cork as for the more adventurous independent-minded travellers