With Covid cooping up many of us indoors throughout the pandemic, and home working becoming the new normal, one of the mostly badly affected business areas has been hotels.

Whether it’s the loss of travellers wanting to stay the night, business conferences being hosted online, or weddings being postponed, hotels have been under pressure from a variety of angles.

One such hotel has been Norton Park, near Sutton Scotney, where manager Steven Lawson says that that ‘things will only get better’ for hospitality as he reopens his venue this week, with it being fully booked at the weekend.

He said: “The money’s not stopping now. Everyone from the CEO down can see hospitality will bounce back really quickly and we need to be prepared for that.”

As with many businesses across the country, staff at Norton Park had to close on March 23 following the announcement of a national lockdown. At the time, Steve remembers that they “really didn’t know what was happening.”

“The team were asking a lot of questions about what happened next,” he said, “and at that point we weren’t aware of the furlough scheme until about 10 days later. That first week was really unsettling for everybody.”

Norton Park operated a skeleton team during this time, with two members of staff working 12 hour shifts to ensure the building was secure, with thousands being lost each month on just Norton Park being closed.

“We were still having other team members ringing in with questions about when they could come back, and at that point we didn’t have all the answers,” he said. “As we got into April and May, the company [Q Hotels] were burning money, so to speak. With 21 hotels it was costing the thick end of £2 million a month to keep them in hibernation.”

However, as lockdown restrictions began to be eased, the hotel looked to examples such as in Las Vegas, where hotels reopened with around a third of their total capacity. Unfortunately, this meant tough decisions had to be made on redundancies.

“We tried to avoid redundancies at all costs,” said Steve. “I was overwhelmed when I started these meetings by the response I got. When we were looking at a department and saying we had to cut hours by half, teams all came together to divide the hours up rather than making people redundant.

“I was really overwhelmed by that, and of my 170 staff we only made four people physically redundant. Two of those were for people who were in their sixties and planning to hang up their boots.”

The hotel then reopened in July, when Steve said that Norton Park “really flew”.

“We had a wedding on the first weekend in the manor house and it went from there,” he said. “People were really drawn because it was a leisure resort with a lot of outdoor space.”

However, as the third national lockdown came in, it was a different story, with supplies and guests ready for a Christmas that had to be curtailed.

“It was a challenging time again,” said Steve. “All the food was bought in for Christmas and it was fully booked. We had to say to people that they could come if they want but they had to leave before 9am on Boxing Day. As a result, most people took a refund back, and we donated the food to people in the area and local homelessness charities.”

After returning to a skeleton staff again, Norton Park began a limited reopening in March for essential workers only, with business ‘starting to trickle in’.

“We’ve had about 30/40 rooms a night Monday to Friday which is good,” said Steve, “and now we’ve reopened this week fully, we’re seeing occupancy increasing until Friday and Saturday night when we’re fully booked. As people get the confidence we’re seeing them coming back.”

To help guests get used to coming back, the hotel has undergone risk assessments for Covid, as well as making rapid tests available at reception while temperatures can be taken on request. There are also a variety of offers and price reductions on offer as the team looks to the future.

“We know that we are going to do a lot of weddings this year at Norton Park,” said Steve, “as people move their weddings from 2020 to 2021, and others deciding that they want to get married during lockdown.”

“I really think the hospitality sector economy will bounce back very quickly and strongly,” Steve added, “as people want to get out and have a break as they have been locked within their own four walls for so long.”