Mountain rescue?

RAE Duffield's five-bedroom guest house in the pretty village of Beddgelert in Snowdonia is called Guesty Plas Tan Y Graig. Roughly translated, this means Manor House Under the Rock - but, since the outbreak of foot-and-mouth, it might have been more apt to call it the Manor House Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Business has not been good.

"It was as if someone had turned off a switch," says Duffield, as she remembers the initial panic in late February. Occupancy plummeted to near-zero in March and, although it has recovered since, it is still 25% down on last year. Duffield says that she expects average occupancy this year to be 50% on bedrooms, for which she charges between £45 and £55.

But for Duffield, although foot-and-mouth was a disaster for the area because of the bad publicity and temporarily closed footpaths, it is not the whole sorry story. She says: "We are 25% down on last year, but last year was 20% down on the year before. We are dealing with a long-term decline here, and the strong pound is one of the main factors."

To emphasise the point, she adds: "The other day, we had a party of Swedes in. For years, Sweden was considered expensive, but they were saying that it was now expensive for them to be here. They said that it was 25% cheaper for them to holiday in Sweden than come here."

The situation is a far cry from when Duffield first arrived in the area, in the late 1980s. In those days in Beddgelert (the double-d is pronounced "th"), the village was so popular that there weren't enough hotel bedrooms to go round. Duffield says: "There used to be a queue of cars in the street outside, with people sleeping in them. When they saw someone coming out of the front door with a suitcase, they would run up the path to get the room. We don't get that any more."

Like many hospitality operators in the region, Duffield gets a high proportion of bookings through her Internet site and is using this to try to recover lost ground.

Broadly speaking, Snowdonia's tourism industry, with its reliance on walkers and mountaineers, has been harder hit by foot-and-mouth than the coastal resorts of North Wales, but nobody seems to have escaped completely. Bodysgallen Hall, the country house run by Historic House Hotels near Llandudno, gets around 20% of its guests from the USA, so bad transatlantic publicity about foot-and-mouth was clearly not welcome.

Matthew Johnson, Bodysgallen's general manager, saw the US reaction at first hand when he went on a business trip to the West Coast with eight other hoteliers in March. "Everybody thought it was the same as BSE," he remembers, "but for us the effects were not so much in cancellations as a fall-off in bookings. In March and April, they were 50% down on the same month last year, whereas in February they had been 50% up."

One result has been that average occupancy at the 35-bedroom Bodysgallen is down to 55% from 68% last year. Johnson says: "Essentially, we took the decision to ride the storm. We have been offering summer breaks but we decided not to discount, and it certainly isn't all doom and gloom."

Two plus points have been that Bodysgallen's achieved bedroom rate has gone up by 3% to £160, and the hotel's 60-seat restaurant, which has a set menu priced at £33.90 for dinner and £17.50 for lunch, has been doing very well with locals. "We haven't got as many rooms let," says Johnson, "but this has allowed us to take more non-residential diners."

In Llandudno, which relies mostly on traditional seaside tourism, business has held up better than in Snowdonia. There is some anecdotal evidence that tourists intending to go on a walking or mountaineering holiday have opted for the coast instead.

But even here, the effects of foot-and-mouth continue to reverberate. David Williams, proprietor of the Ambassador Hotel on Llandudno seafront, and chairman of the local hoteliers association, says: "It's true that the coast isn't suffering as badly, and conference business has started to return. But a lot of the school parties who make their plans some way in advance cancelled because they weren't sure whether they could do their field trips. It takes time for these things to recover."

Some may need more time, but the Ambassador's excellent occupancy figures for June (95%, up from 90% last year), show that you cannot generalise. Williams is naturally pleased with having a full hotel, but points out that annual figures will be hard-pressed to compare with last year because April and May were so poor.

The mixed effects on different areas are reflected in North Wales Tourism's analysis of how much business was lost during the first quarter of 2001. Both Snowdonia and Anglesey fall into the top category, where the downturn in business is estimated at 80-100%. Coastal areas alongside the Snowdonia heartland suffered less, with drops in business of 20-40%, while further eastwards up the North Wales coast, in places such as Rhyl and Colwyn Bay, some hotels have avoided any loss in business and few are any more than 20% down.

This doesn't make it any better for those that have suffered - which, of course, means more than just the hotels. Tourist attractions such as Anglesey Sea Zoo at Brynsiencyn have also been on the rack, and there remains a lot of resentment at the way the Government has handled the crisis.

Alison Lea-Wilson, director of the zoo, says: "We closed for a week in March at the suggestion of MAFF, and in retrospect it was a big mistake because people are still asking us whether we are closed now. The Government cocked it up hugely because they panicked. People thought that Anglesey as a whole was closed."

The effects on the number of visitors to the zoo, established 18 years ago, were immediate and devastating. In March 2000, the zoo had 2,000 visitors; in March 2001, that had fallen to 500. The loss is not just about the entry charge of £5.50 for adults and £4.50 for children, it is about what they spend in the coffee shop and the gift shop as well.

The busiest month for the zoo is August, when schoolchildren are on their summer holidays, but the likelihood of it attracting the 25,000 visitors it got last August are slim, thinks Lea-Wilson. "Our problem is that holiday decisions were made in April," she says.

The zoo had nine full-time staff at the beginning of the year, which was expected to rise to 22 in high season. Many of those temporary staff had already been offered jobs when the foot-and-mouth outbreak struck, but those offers had to be withdrawn, including one to a school dinner-lady who was going to help in the coffee shop. Even worse, the zoo has been forced to lay off one of its full-time staff, has scrapped plans to increase the size of its lobster hatchery, and estimates that it will see at least a 15% drop in its annual £500,000 turnover by the end of the year. "The real fear," says Lea-Wilson, "is that the biggest financial impact will come in November and December, when the banks start getting restive."

So far, the only concrete help that businesses have received is that their council rates have been waived for a year. At the very least, Lea-Wilson would like to see that extended for next year as well. North Wales can use all the help it can get.

Distribution of hotels in North Wales Seaside towns 51%
Small towns 19%
Large towns 2%
Countryside villages 20%

Reasons for cancellation of holidays in North Wales Closure of footpaths 90%
Public fear or ignorance 40%
Closure of local attractions 40%
Source: North Wales Tourism

Contacts

Anglesey Sea Zoo
Tel: 01248 430411
Web site:www.angleseyseazoo.co.uk

Guesty Plas Tan Y Graig
Tel: 01766 890310
Web site:www.plastanygraig.co.ukBodysgallen Hall
Tel: 01492 584466

North Wales Tourism
Tel: 01492 531731

Our series continues next week with a visit to Cumbria.