In 1989, Howard Hastings received a phone call that would ultimately change the course of his life. His father William, a pioneering figure in the hotel industry in Northern Ireland, had been hospitalised with a major stroke and his condition was worsening.

The shadow of the family business had always loomed large in Howard Hasting’s youth. He had worked across its portfolio of hotels, well known and well-appointed properties such as the Europa Hotel and Culloden Estate & Spa. Despite this involvement there was never an expectation he would take over from his father. Instead, he obtained a law degree, qualified as an accountant, and got a job in finance working just outside London.

However, with his father ailing in hospital, it was suggested to him that if he did intend to return to Belfast, now was the time. “This was the first time that the conversation ever came up,” he recalled in this week’s podcast.  

Howard Hastings decided to come back. His father, meanwhile, rallied and went on to live for a further thirty years. For much of that period, they worked in unison, Howard serving as managing director of Hastings Hotels, with his father, who was ultimately knighted for his services to industry, installed as chairman and acting as a mentor to his son.

It was an accidental coming together of two generations, but that one Howard Hastings believes worked beautifully. “He was an absolutely tremendous mentor. He kept things very straightforward, very simple, never over-complicated any issue that confronted him. I also learned not to be scared to take decisions,” he says.

Now, 32 years after returning home to work with his father, Howard Hastings is moving on to the next phase in his career. In mid-January, it was announced that he was becoming chairman of the hotel group, with James McGinn, a company veteran, coming in as managing director.

He will remain active in the business and over the course of the interview, he explained how the resilience of the company’s balance sheet, bolstered by the recent €47 million sale of the Slieve Donard Resort and Spa in Co Down, left it primed for future expansion.

He cautions, however, that the group would not make acquisitions just for the sake of expansion, particularly with inflating asset prices. Whatever the group does next, Hastings is adamant that the values of the family remain ingrained within the business.

“We are now sitting with a balance sheet that would be able to avail of new opportunities coming around. Albeit that the hotel business is very much a property-based business. And there are not too many bargains in property at the moment,” he says.

“So, we pride ourselves on being a family company and holding those values. And so, we’d be looking for opportunities where we can demonstrate those values that people coming to the hotels are not getting that big chain feel but can sense that sort of personal touch that little sense of style around the offering.”

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Hastings Hotels dates back to 1966 and has grown to a portfolio of six hotels in the North. In Belfast, it owns the 5-star Culloden Estate & Spa, the Europa Hotel, the Stormont Hotel and the Grand Central, a recent addition that it the largest hotel in the North. It controls the Everglades Hotel in Derry, the 17th-century Ballygally Castle, and is the co-owner of the five-star Merrion Hotel in Dublin.

It is an impressive and luxurious portfolio. But like most hospitality companies, it has been heavily impacted by the pandemic. In 2020 it reported a pre-tax loss of £16.6 million, a sharp reversal on the previous year when it made a pre-tax profit of £5.8 million. Revenues, meanwhile, halved from £49.4 million to £25.1 million in 2020.

Nonetheless, despite the pandemic-related losses, it still had shareholders’ funds on its balance sheet of £31 million. And this was before the Slieve Donard deal.

Hastings admits that he received a call from his bank manager when the world went into lockdown urging him to continue his capital investment strategy for the group’s existing properties. “You do what you need to do, we’re here to support you,” the bank manager told him.

“That gave me the encouragement to carry on with those projects, which we had already started. I’m glad we did because the best time to do work in a hotel is when you’ve got no customers that you would be annoying or disrupting,” he says. “And if we had paused, and we were restarting now, the supply chain difficulties, and the building cost inflation would have meant that the work that we have done would have cost us significantly more.”

The group has dealt with massive issues in the past. After all, one of its flagship properties, the Europa Hotel, became known as the “most bombed hotel in Europe” after having suffered 36 bomb attacks during the Troubles. However, the pandemic was the first occasion that the group was forced to shut all its hotels.

“All the way through the Troubles we never closed. I think my father, who passed away four years ago, would have found it really, really difficult that an external shock like the pandemic has actually forced on us something that had never been countenanced. And so, from that point of view, it was difficult because there was no read across as to what should you be doing, what should you not be doing,” Hastings says.

“Some weeks during the pandemic, you thought you were doing the clever thing, only to find out that you completely wasted your week or your fortnight or your month on some project that wasn’t going to avail of anything. But I suppose thankfully, we’ve all come through it. And we’re all looking forward and upward now.”

When the group was permitted to reopen in the North, it was still impacted by travel restrictions and a dearth of tourists. Revenues for 2021 were broadly in line with 2020, with Hastings saying that most of its business came from sports teams, the film and television industry (Belfast has a number of studio facilities, something we returned to during the course of our interview) and from visitors from the Republic.

In relation to tourists from the Republic, Hastings believes that it could end up being a new long term market for hoteliers in the North. “Northern Ireland has not been a favoured destination for Republic of Ireland resident trips. It had been growing steadily, but off a very low base. So from 2016 to 2019, Republic of Ireland resident trips had risen across Northern Ireland, from 450,000 to 750,000, trips in the year – two thirds increase and a doubling in spend from the Republic of Ireland,” he says.

The hotelier added: “Before the pandemic, it was always said that there were two and a half million people in the Republic of Ireland who had never overnighted in Northern Ireland. So this was their opportunity, especially in July and August during that period, when the restrictions in Northern Ireland were lighter than the restrictions in the Republic. And I think that persuaded a lot of people who were desperate to get a bit of a break to come north.”

Howard Hastings on Belfast’s booming film industry

“Like so many of these good things, it started off slightly accidentally. There was down in the Belfast docks, what they called the paint hole. This is where in the old days when Belfast was more into shipbuilding than today. They would have brought the boats in for repainting. So this is a very large space with no structural interference. And sort of accidentally someone said, ‘Well, that would make a great set’. Over the years, then it sort of developed such that it’s no longer anywhere near being a paint hole, it’s a full time set. Another set has been built next door to that of equivalent size. And there’s a third very large set in north Belfast, which has been developed by Belfast City Council as well. So, a huge investment has gone into facilitating the infrastructure required. And then on top of that, we’ve started to acquire the skills around films and filmmaking, production and post-production.”

2022 outlook

Hastings said that the North was starting to see an increasing trend before the pandemic of Chinese visitors. However, he says this has “evaporated” over the past two years.

Luckily Europeans and North Americans, two traditional core markets, are now back looking to book trips.

“Both the tour operators have escorted coaches and those facilitating sort of free independent travel are very much suggesting that there’s a pent-up demand there,” he says.

He also said that Belfast was carving out a lucrative niche from cruises, something that had been aided by Dublin’s decision to restrict the number of cruise liners coming into the city.

“Belfast Harbour has worked really hard over a period of years to grow and develop and have now extended their cruise line terminal facilities to better welcome cruise liners. I think we’ve been a beneficiary of customers’ taste in Western Europe. I think the Somali pirates didn’t do much for those wanting to cruise in other parts of the world. And so, Belfast has become increasingly a kind of safe haven destination,” he says.

“And we’re expecting to be ahead in 2022, of where we were in 2019. We’re reckoning maybe as many as 150 cruise ships this year, with 370,000 passengers and crew. I suppose we are also beneficiaries in a sense of decisions taken by Dublin port to restrict the number of cruise liners that they want to see in a year.”

Brexit and the border

As a business leader on both sides of the border, Howard Hastings is ideally placed to assess how the two governments reacted to the crisis.

“During 2021, the government in the North acknowledged that there had been either an element of, or potential that there would be market failure in the hotel and hospitality sector and came out with a package of grants to compensate hotels for their period of closure, which gave sums of money to each property. That didn’t happen in the south, the southern response was more about maintaining employment. In Northern Ireland the furlough scheme ended in the autumn of last year. And currently, even though the most recent wave of the pandemic was very injurious to business throughout the North, there’s not been a further response from government whilst in the Republic, the continuing wage support is looked on slightly enviously by those northern hoteliers,” he said.

In relation to Brexit, he said: “Brexit has little impacted on our business thus far. That’s really more the preserve of manufacturing and other industries. Because of our regime, the Common Travel Area, the free movement of visitors has not been restricted. Some would say that perhaps the labour shortages that we have seen in recent times have been exacerbated by Brexit. And it’s quite hard to say whether that’s true or not, because I can identify from Dublin that we have equal labour shortages there, as we might do in Belfast as an industry.”

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