“All the way through the Troubles we never closed. My father, who passed away four years ago, would have found it really, really difficult that an external shock like the pandemic actually forced on us something that had never been countenanced.”
Howard Hastings is chairman of Hastings Hotels, the family-owned business that owns a string of five-star hotels in the North and has a stake in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. In this podcast with Ian Kehoe, he talks about steering the business through the pandemic, the hospitality outlook for 2022 and how Belfast is benefitting from cruise liners and a booming film industry. He also talks about the lessons he learned from his father William and his own journey in business.