2000… a space oddity

A thousand days; 30 months; two-and-a-half years. Whichever way you look at it, New Year's Eve 1999 is just around the corner. Yet hoteliers seem to be free of millennium fever.

Caterer spoke to many individual and chain hotels, but it seems that hoteliers are holding back on formulating their millennium plans and certainly on naming their prices.

Are UK hotels missing out on an ideal opportunity to host the party of a lifetime? David Quarmby, chairman of the English Tourist Board and British Tourist Authority, says with enthusiasm: "The millennium is a fantastic marketing opportunity for Britain. There is recognition that we are going to make more of it than anywhere in the world.

"It's not just that we can exploit the zero longitude through Greenwich - the Millennium Commission is pumping money into all sorts of projects.

"We've already had a trickle of enquiries through the BTA offices - particularly in North America, because their travel trade press and tour operators' imaginations have been sparked by our plans."

So why are hoteliers procrastinating about forming their own millennium packages?

For many (particularly those in Scotland) New Year's Eve is a traditionally busy time anyway, with high occupancy levels - "we would normally expect 100% occupancy on 31 December and it would be extraordinary if we weren't full then," says David Wilkinson, general manager of the Dorchester in London.

Perhaps hoteliers are simply being smug - expecting to achieve 100% room occupancy on the back of the millennium's high media profile, without having to invest in a marketing drive themselves. Certainly, many have already begun either to take provisional bookings or to form waiting lists.

London's Savoy hotel has, over the past 10 years, acquired a waiting list long enough to fill itself twice over. And Chewton Glen, in Hampshire, has a waiting list of "around 100" for its 52 rooms, according to its managing director Peter Crome. One family made a provisional booking in 1994 to spend the turn of the century at Fort William's Inverlochy Castle in the Scottish Highlands.

Other hotels and hotel groups with waiting lists are: Turnberry, in Ayrshire; the Dorchester; the Savoy Group; Queens Moat Houses hotels; Hilton (National and International); Millennium & Copthorne; Marriott; and Forte. Those taking provisional bookings include Gleneagles in Auchterarder, Scotland; Swallow Hotels; Stakis; and Holiday Inn Worldwide.

Yet none of the individual properties or chains mentioned (with the exception of the Savoy Group's Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds) has formulated a programme of events - customers are booking blind, without even knowing rates.

However, hoteliers argue that they operate an advance booking schedule of 12 months, and in general would not be working more than two years ahead.

Tony Lainchbury, business manager of the HCIMA, is surprised that packages have not been put together by industry leaders. "If you're a sales manager you should be talking to your tour operators [about the millennium] at least two years ahead. Hotels that come up with creative packages will pull in the customers," he says.

But Lainchbury adds a word of warning. "Huge amounts of money" can be wasted if packages are not thought through, he believes.

That is a sentiment Paul Milsom, managing director of Le Talbooth restaurant and hotel in Dedham, Essex (a member of the Pride of Britain consortium), agrees with. "There is a lot of risk attached to doing something grand, and that might be putting people off," he maintains. "There's a lot of chatter about the millennium, but people don't quite know what to do."

On 31 December 1999, Milsom hopes to stage in his restaurant a dinner-dance spectacular which will become a Champagne jazz breakfast in the early hours of the new century.

He has already booked marquee space and talked to wine merchants. But he - as well as Peter Lederer, managing director of Gleneagles - believes that persuading staff to work and booking the entertainment will be the biggest hurdles. Because of the old rule of supply and demand, rates for both will be at a premium.

Oliver Cook, resident manager of Forte's Bath Spa hotel, agrees. "Bands are charging three and four times the normal rate," he says.

At Le Talbooth, Milsom expects to be charging "not less than £250 per head, maybe more than £500 per head", depending on the money he has to spend on his live entertainment package and Champagne.

This figure does not include room rates. He expects to realise full rack rates when the time comes, as he has only 10 rooms in his hotel, but he will not be drawn on what these rates will be.

This is understandable. Hotels review their room rates annually, and the UK could suffer a sharp rise in inflation over the next two-and-a-half years.

But perhaps there is another reason for hoteliers' reluctance to announce room rates or develop millennium packages of their own. Maybe they are out to make a financial killing by holding back their rooms until the 11th hour, when demand for accommodation will be at its highest and they can charge premium prices.

It's an accusation refuted by the hotels Caterer spoke to, most maintaining that room rates would keep pace with inflation and that they didn't want to alienate loyal clientele.

This was especially true of the luxury, country-house independents such as Turnberry, Gleneagles and Chewton Glen.

Stuart Harrison, sales and marketing director of Arcadian International Hotels, maintains that hoteliers have got to look at their hotel and "see what the bottom line is - you've got to get the highest revenue for what your property is worth." At the Dorchester, Wilkinson admits that the "pure economics" of supply and demand will inevitably drive up room and millennium package rates in London.

He adds: "We have to guard against people buying up rooms in London and selling them on." This appears to have happened already. Newspaper reports in February suggested that many London hotels - chains and independents - had guaranteed room availability to the London Millennium Party (LMP), a company set up by its chairman Brian Wilson - whose background is in the construction industry - to run a series of millennium extravaganzas at the Woolwich Army Barracks.

The implication was that Wilson would make a tidy profit of several million pounds. But according to Wilson, he is guaranteeing hotel rooms only to guests who buy £2,000-a-head tickets for his New Year's Eve event through hotel booking agency Hotel Scene. The LMP, he says, has not bought up rooms. His company will merely refer clients to the agency after the LMP launches its millennium programme on 23 May.

Jo Lichfield, business development manager at Hotel Scene, says that although her company has room allocations for the millennium at hotels across the board, she would not expect to confirm these, nor their rates, before 1998. "We haven't any millennium bookings at the moment," she says. Neither have Expotel Hotel Reservations nor Utell International, which both confirm that they are, at present, underwhelmed by millennium enquiries for the UK or for Europe and the USA.

So it seems that guests are contacting hotels direct when it comes to booking, or being put on waiting lists for the dawn of the new century, at least for the moment. But it looks likely that there will be a stampede at some stage for rooms and special events. After all, a millennium only comes once every thousand years, so hoteliers had better get their act together, and fast, if they are going to maximise the marketing opportunity and avoid a band- and staff-booking bun-fight.