ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES HOSPITALITY OWNERS AND OPERATORS SHARE THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES OF COVID-19 AND THEIR VIEWS ON HOW IT HAS BEEN HANDLED BY GOVERNMENT AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF HOSPITALITY IN SCOTLAND.
MY OWN PERSPECTIVE BY NICOLA TAYLOR, CHIEF EXECUTIVE , CHARDON HOTELS
I
am writing this from our own perspective as a family business owning and operating 6 hotels in Scotland under a global franchise with IHG – Holiday Inn Glasgow Theatreland, Holiday Inn Expresses; Glasgow Theatreland, Edinburgh Royal Mile, Edinburgh Airport, Perth and Dunfermline. “Our journey started a little earlier than many when I arrived in Marseille at an IHG European Owners meeting on Monday 9 March. I knew the coronavirus was becoming a concern and I’d even considered cancelling my trip. But nothing prepared me for hearing firsthand an emotional Italian owner’s devastating experience. No guests and zero income with no ability to pay their staff or anyone else. It’s something I will never forget, a bit like “where you were on 9/11?”. Then hearing IHG had shut down over 200 hotels in China, WOW I realised this was going to be bad.
I was meant to travel from Marseille to London for meetings later that week. However, given what I’d heard, I flew straight back to Glasgow to brief our senior team and GM’s. I think that was one of my hardest trips home as I tried to figure out how to break the news, how to be factual, honest and unemotional. Everyone’s reaction was very different and that’s what makes us human. We all start the journey at a different time, we all accept change at a different speed, and we always need to try to remember that. (It will be the same as we eventually come out of this.) In some ways, we were lucky to have a couple of weeks before lockdown to pull together some sort of plan and make sure our focus was on keeping as many people in jobs as we could, especially to get the business back up and running once this was over. We knew it’d be a few months of disruption BUT we
