The chairman of Best Western Hotel has said this has been the “longest, sustained, most difficult period” for business he has seen in 30 years, describing rising running costs. Robert Smith also admitted that he may have to pass on some of the costs to customers. Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Once we get past April it will be very difficult. Having been in the business for 30 odd years,
00:05this is now the longest sustained, most difficult period of business I've known from COVID onwards
00:12and what it's done to our industry. And we are an industry which I think is the third largest
00:20in the country in the hospitality sector. We've got, as an industry, we've got costs of approximately
00:253.4 billion coming, according to UK hospitality, into our business. We can't sustain that.
00:31People will and businesses will fall over. The impact of inflation on us and our supply chain
00:36has been massive. Food and drink, particularly, has been increasing in a big way and, of course,
00:42the cost of utilities has continued to rise from the beginning of the war in Ukraine. So
00:50we are seeing continuous increases year on year and month on month. We've worked over the few
00:59last few years to mitigate what we've done, but because it's been going on for a few years now,
01:04there seems very little movement now and ability to mitigate any further. So I'm afraid we are
01:10going to be passing a lot of these costs on to the customers. It is simply going to make our
01:17lives far more difficult to make a profit. It's become very difficult to make a profit.
01:22The NIC changes and the minimum wage increases and the business rate increases, which are coming
01:29in April, are going to put further strain on the businesses. Any profits which would have been made
01:35and kept and retained and reinvested in the business, i.e. creating income to local tradesmen,
01:43local furniture manufacturers and the such like, will now not happen. We have
01:51got to a stage where we are having to reduce opening hours, reduce numbers of staff,
01:57really nitpicking at the little costs that we can save, but there's not many that we can do anymore.