Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Investing in HotelsAuthor(s): Ian HillSource: Fortnight, No. 14 (Apr. 2, 1971), p. 16Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25543431 .

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16 FRIDAY, 2nd APRIL, 19? 1

Finance Pages_

Investing

in Hotels By Ian Hill

Belfast has become a forest of scaffold

ing, and tall, insect like, yellow cranes as the hotel building boom continues. Grand

Metropolitan's Europa towers over what was once John Betjemans favourite

provincial railway station facade. It is to

open later in the year with 200 bedrooms all with private facilitiesi CIE-Great Southern have a similar operation going up almost opposite the City Hospital where first Royal Terrace and then the Russel Court once stood. Sometime in the future the Great Southern will amass another 140 bedrooms. Then there is the PV Doyle Montrose project out at Balmoral with its planned 130 rooms.

Holiday inns are thinking of a 100 bedroom structure off tne M-i witn a

complimentary one in Antrim. The Stor mont Hotel is undergoing major surgery

to encourage, rather than remove, a

growth, and the Culloden has grown a

wing if not wings. Then Scott Bros, are

contemplating a 100 bedroom complex on the Antrim Road overlooking Belfast

Lough. At the last count Belfast had some 1054

bedrooms, of which only 308 had what the trade terms private facilities'. Soon over 50 per cent of the bedrooms will

have these facilities plus conference facilities for 700 badge wearing delegates in the Europa and 300 in the Great

Southern. And that doesn't count wnate

ver may happen to Belfast Castle.

Out in the country sods are being turned too: the White Gables, 4

bedrooms, has just opened in Hills

borough, there is the Bohill Auto Inn near

Coleraine with 30 bedrooms most of which have those magic PSs' in the guide books. A Canadian group called Spencer are planning a hotel for Craigavon, and Trust Houses have a Post House sched uled for there too. Londonderry is going to have more bedrooms and when

Aldergrove goes international and jumbo there will be another big building there.

So why so many hotels? It's not just that the Grand Central, the Conway and the Royal Avenue can't cope with the clutches of foreign camera crews. Two

factors come into it: the province is under 'hotelled' and there are very attractive grants available for investors. As to being under hotelled' (well it's better than saying it's under bedded), obviously Grand Met and CIE don't jump in to get their accounts lingures burned

in unused crepe suzettes, so their surveys have shown the need in Belfast. Belfast

they say is big enough for all of them. Out* in the country the need is obvious too. Take a charter plane load of tourists

coming into Londonderry; as Robert Hall, Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board asked a non plussed 'Derry audience recently, where do you put them? You'd have to split the group up and that is not something the travel agent wants to do.

The grants situation is even more

interesting; earlier this year the West minster Government closed down their Hotel Grants scheme leaving Ulster as the only place in Great Britain where a developer can ask for, and receive, a 33 f? per cent grant towards the cost of ;mprovements or new hotels.

Why not the South you ask? Well down south the story for the potential, or indeed the current developer is not so

glossy. Recent reports show that bookings for southern hotels are generally low and that, according to the economists the old story about it being the troubles in the north causing the decline is just so much of a smokescreen. In many areas the developers have given the tourist hotels and nothing but hotels, and that just isn't enough any more. Once you move out of the city your development must provide packaged leisure if you want the tourist back. The NITB can learn a lot from Bord Failtes mistakes. The kind of development company they are now known to be trying to attrart ? with it

Development of Tourist Traffic (Amendment) Act (N.I.) 1963, the Tourist

Traffic (Amendments) Acts (N.I.), 1966 and 1968 and S.R. & O. 51, 1963 (N.I.)

is rumoured one major success ? is the developer who is prepared to do it in the grand style. Having made his million in

whole village beach projects on the Costa Dorada, this kind of investor is now

looking nearer home for leisure industry investment and he is big enough to think in terms of building a village, say, of one

hundred Finnish style log cabins round a central hotel complex and to provide, inside this new version of the rich mans estate, huntin' shootin' and fishin' ? and also cruising, sailing, canoeing, swimming, camping waterskiing, bird watching and pony trekking.

With the whole leisure industry boom ing right across Europe, the investor must be looking at non sunshine projects. The question is can they be attracted to

Lough Erne, which is where the NITB is very keen for them to go. Certaintly the grants are attractive, loan assistance is possible under certain circumstances, the uncrowded lakes are there, and the

But what about the troubles? Well natives are friendly.

despite the reported drop in bookingsthis year, the hotel men who have so far

committed themselves show no sign of

wavering. In Belfast, troubles or no

troubles, first class hotel bedrooms are needed. Outside, it is the resorts who have been complaining, but, as with the

South, is it really the troubles which are

hitting them? Two weeks in Bangor has lost some of its shine over the years now that Clarksons can take the family to

Benidorm, with real sunshine and free wine for the same price. Surveys in many North West Europe countries show that,

inside the travel' boom, the boarding house and the unlicenced hotel has been the only sector of the accommodation

spectrum to falter, and fall behind. There is still a big market for the seaside

hotelier, but it is a market which has changed.

As the crowds close in, Lough Erne is the last underpopulated potential tourist

paradise sitting way out on the edge of

Europe. When the NITB ran that colour double spread of a misty evocative Lough Erne with its caption 'Not Many People Seem To Know About Us Here' maybe they were really talking to the big property investment companies.

Training the Cooks

The front runners don't have all the

advantages. The trail-blazer can be heroic, dynamic and creative. But the man who follows a ready-trodden path can sidestep several of the hazards which the pathfin der could not possibly have avoided.

Neither does the second string runner lose all that much time. Admittedly he

must hang back while his more adven

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