By Robin Sheppard, President, Bespoke Hotels
Hotel News is sponsored by Guestline
Am I the only one struggling to understand ‘free market economics’ right now?
Despite people having effectively 20% less purchasing power than two years ago, the Bank of England has decided rather than not having enough, we’ve all got too much disposable income. Who knew!
Apparently, because of our irrational desire to continue spending that dwindling sum on ‘stuff’, what people really need is to hand any spare cash over to financial institutions and brace themselves for a jolly good recession, and then, in the words of the prime minister, ‘hold your nerve’.
Having raised interest rates on outgoings (regularly/rapidly) and on savings (slowly/reluctantly), inflation has now started to trend down slightly – in other words, go up slightly less rapidly. I had been labouring under the illusion that the point of the free market was to make people better off and allow us to decide what we want to spend our hard-earned cash on, and in doing so, enable businesses to sell things.
As a hospitality professional, I suppose I could be biased. We’re an industry that depends, not just on people having some money, but having it in sufficient quantities to allow some discretionary spending. And that doesn’t apply solely to consumers, but to businesses too who nowadays have a perfectly valid excuse for encouraging their people to conduct meetings in the virtual world.
So, to have the last vestiges of disposable cash that middle earners possess, deliberately and systematically removed, might diplomatically be described as a knee to the nether regions (you know, those regions that are in the process of ‘supposedly’ being levelled up – but that’s another for another time).
And it’s not as if our industry hasn’t already been the victim a series of unfortunate events these last seven or eight years.
If you’d told me in 2015 that within a few years, one of our key sources of people would be cut off for no good reason; that the entire country would be confined to home for extended periods; that the very act of travelling would be identified as part of the existential threat of climate change – I feel I could have been forgiven for packing it all in, and finding another sector to invest in. Yet here we are – like the Black Knight from the iconic Monty Python and the Holy Grail – shorn of most of our limbs and haemorrhaging fast, yet optimistic and resilient in the face of seemingly insuperable adversity.
I guess it’s not really in the nature of being ‘hospitable’ – but, honestly, there are days when ‘tis but a scratch’ really doesn’t cover the extent of the damage. Hospitality is hard at the best of times. And these, most certainly, are not the best of times.
Hotel News is sponsored by Guestline
