NO BOOM AT THE INN: INSIDE IRELAND'S HOTELS:Occupancy is steady but spending is down at Lyrath Estate in Kilkenny. So the hotel has hit upon a survival strategy, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
IT’S A Monday night in the five-star Lyrath Estate hotel – which “fuses contemporary hotel design with the original 17th century house” – and the hotel restaurant is surprisingly busy. Middle-aged couples engage in desultory chat or awkward silences, gazing out at the landscaped gardens. “You’ll be having the crème brûlée,” says a woman tonelessly to her man. Four voluble Irishmen, unmistakeably engaged in agribusiness, are expounding loudly on the subject. One demands to know the birthplace of the waitress. “Lithuania,” she says pleasantly, calmly collecting the plates.
A tour group of Americans from Minnesota has already dined. At around 9pm, says a veteran guide, they’ll start ringing reception to enquire about the air conditioning, looking for ice buckets and directions for the TV remote. “We start and finish early,” says one of the tour group, a quiet, retired bus mechanic, over black coffee at 7am next morning. Later, he and his wife will have the full breakfast, before climbing back on the bus.
Lyrath’s owner, Xavier McAuliffe, will be hovering in the lobby at breakfast time, at pains to point out that he is no Johnny Come Lately builder/developer.
“I’ve been in this business for 45 years. And there were no tax breaks then . . . I never got a grant.” He quibbles over the alleged €50 million price tag put on Lyrath. It was “over €40 million”, apparently, but he agrees it was crazy. “You’ll never get it back.”
McAuliffe clearly loves the business, and Kilkenny. He chats easily to the staff, enquiring amiably about one employee’s “date night” with her husband. Meanwhile, he insists the business is paying its way.
Lyrath Estate must make €670,000 a month to meet its costs, says Patrick Joyce, the boyish-looking general manager, who – like many of the youthful senior staff – is still in his 30s. This includes a swingeing rates bill of €250,000 a year (equivalent to 8 per cent of every room sold) and, probably, some bank repayments. According to an accountant, the latter can account for about 20 per cent of a hotel’s costs.
It’s a detail McAuliffe’s Nama-locked counterparts don’t have to worry about, according to hotel lore. “Basically banks are saying ‘keep the cash flowing and the staff and suppliers paid and all is well.’ So they have a cushion,” says another hard-pressed midlands hotelier.
Most hotels have a story about losing out to a “Nama hotel” because they simply can’t compete on bedroom prices.
Joyce has the scars to prove it. He has had to make 18 redundancies since he arrived. The staff is now around 180 and the wage bill last week was €76,000. The hotel’s two restaurants now operate only on alternate nights. The second bar and the doorman only operate at weekends.
Though only five years old, Lyrath has had a bumpy history – and that’s apart from the reality TV show about its opening. Joyce became its fourth general manager in about 18 months when he arrived here in 2007 (via five-star resorts in the Maldives and Thailand).
He wasn’t here to witness the “ramping up” of boom-time Ireland, so the reality was a shock. People would go up to the bar, order two pints of beer and hand over a €50 note, then return 45 minutes later, and throw another €50 note at the bar for another two. Clearly the challenge of fishing out the change from the previous round was too much.
He’s not convinced that the recession has kicked in, even now. “I read a recent report saying we still have the third highest wages in Europe. People are still drinking cappuccinos from the coffee shop out of paper mugs.”
His suggestion that Lyrath’s occupancy has fallen only slightly in recent years appears to chime with that. “It was always 63 to 65 per cent. This year, it’s around 63 to 64. June is up by 12 per cent. And we have €200,000 in forward bookings for July – a huge amount of Irish families. August is slightly back on the same month last year but you’ll always see a sudden surge in bookings when the sun shines.”
But as with elsewhere, customers’ spend is down, hovering at 15 to 20 per cent below its peak.
Though some 28 per cent of bookings are made online, the client will invariably follow it up with a phone call to extract maximum value. Most ask for an upgrade. It’s worth a try, if the timing is right, says rooms division manager Elaine Scott. A reference to a birthday or a honeymoon can also be effective, although one gent has had no fewer than five “honeymoons” in the past 16 months and another appears to have several birthdays a year. “The thing is, they’d get an upgrade anyway as they’re repeat visitors,” Scott says.
But the clear impression is that it’s young women and not men who are germane to Lyrath’s survival strategy. Joyce saw the potential when a heavily pregnant women phoned to say she was coming to meet friends and asked to be collected from the train station. Joyce himself picked her up (more evidence of the great multi-tasking revolution), and while driving her back, heard a radio news item to the effect that 80 per cent of unemployment was male-orientated. The conjunction of groups of female friends with women holding the more stable jobs clicked. Packages such as “Girls Allowed” were born. “It went off like a rocket”, Joyce says. In fact, according to McAuliffe, 80 to 90 per cent of weekend guests are women – “a lot of them civil servants”, he adds, perhaps in mischief.
AS THE WEDDING INDUSTRY increasingly provides Lyrath’s “bread and butter”, in Joyce’s words, this is another area where young women are assiduously courted.
Weddings have climbed from a few dozen in 2007 to 80 this year. “They’re a tremendous source of business and we are very appreciative of it,” says Joyce.
But again, spend has fallen. Guest numbers have fallen from an average of 180-200 to 140-160 and menu prices from €75 a head on average, to around €60. As we speak, events manager Dervla O’Connor is having an exchange of views with a future bride. The deal is struck for 160 guests, whereupon the bride suggests that maybe O’Connor can toss in another 40, free of charge. O’Connor is almost dumbstruck.
“Brides are a lot more panicky now,” she says. The “miscellaneous” list can run to several pages from the positioning of crystals around the candelabras, to sweets in a basket for the ladies’ toilet.
Which brings us back to the well-worn theme of corkage. The hotel doesn’t “do corkage”, O’Connor says. “Yes, you can get your wine for a fiver a bottle, but you won’t get the staff standing there wearing white gloves for the night, ready to pour it, nor will you be met at the door by Tom in a top hat, nor a pianist in the lobby.”
The challenges don’t end there. The once highly lucrative corporate convention market has fallen victim to shareholders’ optics. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are not allowed to use hotels with spas – so Lyrath soft-pedals the spa and has removed it from the name. They also play down the five-star billing, and market the hotel and convention centre as separate entities.
THE HOTEL BUSINESS BRINGS out the best and worst of human nature. Deputy general manager Emma Jayne Eaton still remembers a guest who took against the recorded female voice used in the lift, and then went around demanding each of the pictures be straightened.
And of course, there are the perennial “accidents” people can have (hoteliers’ stories can chill the spine); EJ, as she’s known, understands them. She is less sanguine about the ones “who actually destroy a room”. Smokers often feature. One pulled a shower cap over the smoke alarm, and covered that with a sock. Within seconds, the computer sensed the system was faulty, triggering a 3am evacuation.
Budgeting pressures are evident in the figures scrawled on a massive wallchart in Elaine Scott’s office, detailing monthly sales targets and sales achieved. The pressure to make the sale is there on the wall. But how to satisfy a woman who wishes to book a babysitter for a date in 2012 and wants the babysitter’s name, NOW? It’s not an easy job, despite the calm, easy aura projected by staff.
It’s Monday and Patrick Joyce is plainly upset by a withering email addressed to The Irish Times from a guest, still in situ, who is hopping mad about levies relating to breakfast in the room and the use of the hydrotherapy pool attached to the spa. Breakfast in bed is charged at €10 a head, she fumes. It’s not, it’s €10 a room, Joyce insists.
The guest sends photos of the breakfast order form, clearly stating €10 a head. Joyce finds the room directory showing it at €10 a room.
“There is genuinely a typo on an old order form,” he concedes wearily. A cynical head might accuse him of chancing his arm, but his pained insistence rings true. After a civil meeting, where he has offered her a complimentary stay, including breakfast in bed, she declines, adding that she understands the “thinking behind both charges” for the in-room breakfast and outdoor pool. But she still believes they are “ridiculous and insulting”.
Did you know it takes 45 minutes and costs between €7 and €8 on average to arrange, deliver and remove a room breakfast order?
Maybe the truth is that we just can’t afford all that stuff anymore.
