Well it was an eventful few days last week. The pressure of the gas here at the hotel had been fluctuating over a few days and on calling out the gas engineers we were politely told that unfortunately they would have to turn us off until the new part arrived. Thankfully being a Tuesday evening in January we did not have too many unhappy guests, in fact most of the guests were extremely understanding about the entire situation and although alternative accommodation had been sought they all still chose to stay at the hotel. I was surprised to hear this as a night without central heating and hot water would definitely have put me off. It was quite clear to me that the good old “British” spirit well and truly kicked in and our guests battled on regardless. We collected electric heaters from unoccupied bedrooms as well as neighbouring hotels and managed to stay warm. Thank goodness it was quite mild for the middle of January!!

Richard our (forces trained) breakfast chef managed to still cook all the lovely tasty croissants, pain au chocolate and breads as well as the full English Breakfast that has become a large part of why guest like to stay at the Fowey. I hear a few voices saying “well how on earth did he manage that, with no gas burners?” Well Richard got his thinking cap on and decided to cook the bacon, sausage and tomato in the only electric oven and then brought in his gas camping stove from home to cook the fried eggs, mushrooms and fried bread. Thankfully, a lot of the guests commented on how tasty everything was and how resourceful the chef had been to still be able to offer the same delicious standard of breakfast. I think this is what helps to give the hotel its “special” quality, Richard is one of many stars that we have here at the hotel and it is at times like last week that they shine even brighter than normal. Well done to Richard, Ray (who stressed almost as much as I did!) and all the team for keeping the hotel up and running with a smile on their face.

You will be pleased to hear that the gas is now back on and running a lot more efficiently, two days of no hot water or central heating was enough for anyone to endure. It should not only be the staff I thank but also the fantastic attitude of the guests. Without their positive outlook and understanding my job would have been made a lot harder. So a BIG thank you goes out to each and every one of our guests that “stuck it out” THANK YOU!!

Other than talking to gas suppliers for the last few weeks we have been preparing for the new financial year. Writing budgets, marketing strategies and carrying out appraisals are all part of the job over the winter months in preparation for yet another busy season. So in light of this I have just returned from our annual Budget meeting at The Grand Hotel in Torquay. A fine tooth comb is used in order to examine all the sales, costs, wages and overheads for the year, it’s pretty interesting but very exhausting – I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to be an accountant!!!

I’m off to the annual team dinner awards on Monday at Cambourne College, Redruth – I have been asked to judge (Food service side) along with another person within the industry. I’m sure it will be a very eventful day and evening. I will keep you posted as to how it went.

Annual Managers Conference, good fun had by all. Well almost all…..

Well here I am endeavouring to update my blog as regularly as I possibly can. Sadly due to the hotel experiencing a “quiet patch” I am a little short of material, however I can fill you in on the antics of last weekend whilst at the Grand Hotel for our annual Managers Conference.

This year’s conference was our fourth in the group and it was good to see that the organisers (Jason Parry GM and Alan Wagstaff Group HR, at the Grand Hotel) had been listening to our feed back from the previous events. Four of us from the Fowey Hotel drove up on Sunday afternoon and we all met at 4:30pm after some “Mocktails” (basically no alcohol!). Once we had established our groups, our first task was to plan and prepare a 3-minute advert, we had just under an hour to discuss and record the ad and it wasn’t as easy to do as you would think. Andrew (Metropole) and his team got the winning vote as they put theirs to music in a very “Marks and Spencer’s” style, classy with few words and good (simple) filming.

Despite our team being very impressed with this teams advert they still felt it “funny” to sabotage our teams task that we were all set the next day! This being, to drop an egg from approximately 10 feet without it breaking. We were given £100 of Monopoly money in order to firstly purchase the egg (for £50!) then use the remaining money to buy “padding and packaging”. All sounds straightforward I hear you say! Well on leaving the room after Andrews team had completed their task they sneakily passed some (illegal) padding to one of our team members saying that “you may find this helpful with this task”. So we used it (thinking we were being clever), in addition to the extra packaging that we purchased. We were blissfully unaware that this would affect our status and on learning that our egg had NOT broken we were then told that we had been disqualified due to the use of illegal packaging!!! Well you can imagine our annoyance! Yvonne (group Marketing Manager in our team) could not contain her furry, so much so that she got her own back the next day! Coffee Andrew??? One lump of salt or two? Hey, don’t mess with the best Jenkins!