At a time when receivership seems like the only choice on the menu for Irish hotels, one Westmeath hotelier is predicting a growth in his business and a doubling of staff.
Businessman Gerard Lynam is putting the finishing touches to a planning application which, if successful, would see the Middleton Park Hotel, Castletown Geoghegan, Westmeath increase its bed numbers from 16 to 29 and almost double his staff from 26 to 50.
Despite the trend in the rest of the industry, Lynam expects turnover this year will be up 10 per cent and up 20 per cent next year.
This year bookings are up 20 per cent on last year.
The Dubliner sold his own house at the height of the boom in 2006, a time when he describes the country as “mad” and put most of the proceeds into restoring the country house on the outskirts of Castletown Geoghegan.
Business is good, but not easy. “When the recession really started to kick, around April 2008, turnover in the restaurant plummeted,” he says. However he’s reluctant to get involved in strategies that have seen hotel after hotel go into receivership.
He refuses to aggressively cut room rates, describing it as “a form of madness which is great for the customer but for the industry in the long run, is not sustainable”.
Instead, the hotel closes on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays when Lynam admits there’s no business and, in the old-fashioned way of Irish hotels, will close for around six weeks after Christmas.
“I’m bucking the trend and I’m very happy to say that. I have a unique product and a different way of doing things,” he says.
Lynam, whose great-great grandfather was born in the Castletown Geoghegan area in 1864 specialises in weddings and has seen numbers rise from just 14 in 2007, the first year of business, to 60 this year.
Next year he expects that number to rise to 80, which he sees is the hotel’s comfortable capacity.
While it had been hoped that the planning application for the three phase development would have been lodged late last year or early this year, the hotelier is expecting final plans this week and hopes to lodge them with Westmeath County Council in the very near future.
If successful, it will see a substantial increase in the hotel’s capacity and workforce in a part of Westmeath that is without major industry or employers.
If the planning application goes through, Lynam hopes to begin the extension in January, when the hotel is closed, then the new wing will be built in the summer and the efficiency building part of the plan in the autumn of next year.
