The owner of Aberdeen’s only five-star hotel said yesterday that the pound crashing in the wake of the referendum could be good for business.
The Marcliffe Hotel and Spa attracts a lot of golf tourists from North America and Stewart Spence said he expects more to follow as Sterling weakens.
He said: “As Donald Trump said on Saturday when I met up with him, ‘my golfers are loving this’. We do a lot of golf business and now it will be cheaper for them to get here.”
Mr Spence was speaking after accounts lodged with Companies House showed the hotelier had made a loss for the first time.
He said the venue’s aborted sale to housebuilder Stewart Milne Group (SMG) had put a dent in its balance sheet.
SMG had been negotiating to buy the property, and with a deal thought to be close, the hotel stopped taking bookings beyond November 2014 and forked out £203,035 in redundancy payments for staff in the 2014-15 financial year. Mr Spence pulled off a shock in March 2015 when he revealed the hotel would remain open long term, saying both parties had “walked away” from the deal in a mutual agreement amid public pleas to keep the hotel open.
Mr Spence said yesterday he was disappointed the deal fell through.
SMG declined to comment.
Since the decision to remain open was made, Mr Spence has spent £500,000 on refurbishing the Marcliffe to show his long term commitment to the business.
He also said bookings for functions had picked up from autumn 2015 onwards, but that the improvement had come too late to bolster the hotel’s 2014-15 figures.
Pitfodels Holdings, the Marcliffe’s parent company, fell to a pre-tax loss of £416,677 in the year to September 30, 2015, down from a profit of £926,216 a year earlier.
Turnover went down to £4.34million from £7.57million.
Mr Spence said he would be happy just to break even during the current financial year in light of the Aberdeen hotel market’s struggles amid the oil price downturn.
He said: “I’ve got a saying: ‘$50 oil equals 50% occupancy’. That’s the goal for the year. When oil was at $110 it could have been 100% occupancy.
“Now we’re running at 75% occupancy because of the golfers but once they go, it will be quite during the winter season so I’m looking at all year round 50% occupancy with oil at that price.”