STUFF THE world wide web and social media. It seems it’s still possible for major events to go unnoticed among large swathes of the global population.
Take Ireland’s economic collapse post 2007.
According to David Webster, general manager of the Carton House resort near Maynooth in Co Kildare, practically the entire population of India is oblivious to the fact that we’re now broke after years of buying up foreign apartments and hotels, purchasing helicopters, and bringing home suitcases full of Tommy Hilfiger shirts and jumpers from discount malls in the US.
Webster travelled to India five months ago to try and drum up conference and events business for Carton House.
“The place is just booming and everyone I talked to wanted to talk about Ireland,” he says. “They were saying Ireland is like India, it’s a real tiger economy, and I’m saying, ‘No, that ended three or four years ago’.”
Are you really suggesting that no-one in India, the world’s biggest democracy, has a clue that Ireland is virtually bust?
“Not one,” Webster shoots back. “A few didn’t even know where Ireland was. They didn’t know that the Irish economy had collapsed and I’m talking everyone . . . not one person could talk about it.”
Has anyone told the National Treasury Management Agency? Maybe we could sell them some Government bonds.
Sadly, Webster felt the need to put them straight on our current predicament. Not that this has put them off coming here, it seems.
“They’re all happy to come,” he reports cheerily, adding that Carton House’s €120-a-night bed and breakfast rate is considered great value in India.
“We’ve had quite a few enquiries since and have got a bit of business from them. That’s a market well worth investing in going forward. It has real potential.”
There is much about Carton House that is sure to appeal to Indian visitors if and when they visit. The picturesque estate comprises about 1,100 acres, with two championship golf courses (it will host the 2013 Irish Open), modern conference facilities and what Webster describes as “four-star deluxe” accommodation.
There are also top class football pitches that have been used by GAA county teams preparing for the final stages of the All Irelands, the Irish rugby team, and everyone from Wayne Rooney to Ronaldo.
The hotel itself is a successful fusion of the stately manor house, which dates back to mid-18th century, and newer glazed extensions that give a modern twist to the facilities. Motorway and other road improvements have also made it more accessible to Dublin airport and the capital in recent years.
Not that the hotel has escaped the impact of the recession. Its investor owners are saddled with debts from the development that are now difficult to repay.
Developer Paddy Kelly is a part owner and his loans are with the National Asset Management Agency.
However, Carton is probably more associated with the Mallaghan family, who were a driving force behind its development in the last decade, much to the annoyance of some heritage groups.
Webster steadfastly refuses to discuss the finances of the resort’s owners, insisting he can only talk about the hotel and golf courses.
“Everything was trading great for us in 2006 when we opened and in 2007. Then [in] the last quarter of 2008 the whole thing just literally fell off a cliff,” he says.
“A lot of our business is conferences and events, and leisure and golf. The conferences and events were built around the banks and the construction industries and they just turned off the taps.”
Pay cuts of up to 10 per cent were implemented in 2009 and its full-time headcount was trimmed from 126 to 114.
Happily, business has rebounded somewhat. Turnover last year ticked up to €16 million and will be “slightly ahead” of last year, Webster predicts.
He’s coy about profitability. The hotel is making a “good” operating profit is all he will say. Carton House achieved an average room occupancy of 70 per cent last year.
“For a resort, that’s very good,” Webster claims. “The Dublin city centre annual occupancies are about 73 per cent, so we compare well with that.”
Like most Irish businesses, Carton House is having to run a bit faster just to stand still. Webster and his team focus much of their efforts on big sectors such as pharma and consumer goods. Its conference business is half and half, driven by domestic and international companies. He name checks Nestlé, Cadbury, Kraft and Kerry Group among its repeat clients.
“UK, France, Germany and the US. That’s pretty much it ,” he says. “We went to India about four months ago to test that water, we’re going to China towards the end of this year just to explore that market as well. We were also in Russia a few weeks ago to make sure all our eggs aren’t in the one basket.”
Carton House is also making a push on brand extensions. Last year, it opened a cafe in Brown Thomas, which came about “purely by accident”, he says.
“Three years ago, we decided to make Christmas puddings as corporate gifts and people loved them. So we made more and sold them. The following year we started to sell them in the lobby.
“Somebody from Brown Thomas saw them and thought they would sell well in the store so we . . . asked if they would be interested in retailing these products – Christmas puddings, cranberry sauce and mulled wine.”
One thing led to another and the cafe opened in June 2011. “It’s a great window for the brand and their customers are our customers.”
He says the cafe has “done well” and will make a profit this year. Webster believes the concept could travel, citing Dundrum (House of Fraser or Harvey Nichols perhaps?) as a potential location and possibly even the posh Selfridges department store in London, a sister outlet of Brown Thomas.
Carton House has also published a cook book, selling about 8,000 copies, and is due to begin retailing a purple branded kitchen apron for €20 a pop around now – the type you’ll see staff wearing in the resort.
It is also working on a “prototype brown soda bread” that might be suitable for production on a commercial scale. Webster has strong views on how Ireland should be promoting itself as a tourist destination. He argues that the three bodies – Tourism Ireland, Fáilte Ireland and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board – currently promoting the island is probably two too many and leads to a certain duplication of effort.
And he believes greater focus should be placed on attracting more business tourism, which would help to boost trade during the traditionally quiet months of winter.
“To me, that has massive potential for Ireland,” he says. “Business people tend to stay longer, they tend to spend more money when they’re here and you’ll have people from good companies experiencing the hospitality and professionalism of Ireland.”
Good air access is key to attracting business travellers and Webster believes there is now decent connectivity to north America (with the exception of the west coast of the US) and to Asia, thanks to routes offered by UAE carriers Emirates and Etihad. But he’s not keen on Ryanair being allowed to acquire Aer Lingus.
“Whether you like Ryanair or dislike Ryanair in terms of customer service or pricing, if you have a monopoly on air access for an island it would have undesirable consequences. A monopoly for customers is not good.”
Carton House will be hoping to attract plenty of visitors next year when it hosts the Irish Open golf tournament, which has re-emerged as a key event on the European tour calendar. Portrush’s staging this year proved a massive success, attracting 130,000 visitors.
How will Carton House top that? “We’re meeting the European tour at the end of August to begin the planning stages,” he explains.
“The whole idea is to make it a festival of golf, to involve families, to involve the town of Maynooth. So we’re putting together plans for that.”
A lot will depend on the weather, but Webster insists that Carton House could handle “similar numbers” to Portrush.
“The European tour wants a quality venue, with good access, close to big residential areas. We have hosted two Irish Opens in the past.”
It also played host earlier this month to the European Amateur Championships.
It remains to be seen if the Colin Montgomerie-designed course or the Mark O’Meara one will be chosen to host the event. Either way, Webster insists that Carton House will be ready and the resort will incur only modest costs from staging the tournament.
“The Montgomerie course you could literally use now. We wouldn’t have to invest anything in the golf course. The staging, they look after.”
What are the benefits of hosting the event?
“There’s a halo effect from hosting the Irish Open. That will have a positive effect on golf membership, on pay and play, and people wanting to stay in the hotel and use the resort. You can certainly say it will increase your revenues.”
The resort has about 600 golf members at present. “Membership has been steady ,” he says.
Webster comes across as a grounded individual with none of the starch or stiff upper lip that some hotel general managers bring to the role. He doesn’t even have a personal assistant.
His wife Jennifer runs a drama school in Tallaght, offering “affordable” speech and drama lessons.
Webster began his career in hospitality at 17 with a part-time job as a waiter in the Stillorgan Park Hotel, which was a bit of a hike from his home in Tallaght.
“The 75 bus at the time got me over there, and back in the 1980s you were lucky to get a part-time job.”
Webster “fell in love” with the industry, which has a reputation for long hours and grinding work. He studied hotel management at the University of West London, working part-time to pay the bills.
The Dubliner then completed postgraduate studies at the University of Ulster before joining the graduate management programme for Marriott Hotels in 1994. He was 23.
This involved working throughout the UK. “I got to work in city centre hotels, resorts, provincial hotels. I loved that.”
His time with Marriott involved a couple of years working as a revenue analyst, studying the mix of the business and looking at ways to grow sales.
He was then appointed as general manager of the Peterborough Marriott. It wasn’t a glamour posting by any means but it helped to hone his skills.
He left Marriott to become commercial director for 14 Hilton Hotels in London.
“That was fantastic. You had the Park Lane Hilton and the London Metropole Hilton doing £50 million each, and then the Heathrow Hilton, which was a completely different mix of business.”
Webster started that role not long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US sent the global travel industry into a spin.
“All international travel stopped for three or four months. but that’s when you reinvent yourself and we started going after European tour operators.”
After Hilton, he headed for the Belfry golf resort in England, where he worked for Sean Quinn for three and a half years – Sean senior that is, not junior (who is currently serving time in Mountjoy for contempt of court), even though the property was registered in the son’s name.
Webster actually worked for De Vere hotels, which ran the property for the Quinns.
What was it like working for Sean Quinn?
“He was a very charming man,” was Webster’s diplomatic answer. “De Vere were very professional and knew what they were doing.
“He [Sean Quinn] paid a crazy price for it because he was outbid for Wentworth [golf resort]. Rumour had it that he’d never even set foot inside it before he bought it. He thought it was something different.”
Quinn had plans to knock the hotel at the Belfry and replace it with a much larger development, but they never got off the ground before the demise of his business empire in 2010.
“He paid to buy De Vere out of the management contract, £20 million I think. They [De Vere] offered for me to stay on with them but I’d two young kids, so my wife and I decided to come back to Ireland.”
He joined Carton House in March 2007.
Much of the chatter in the Irish hotel industry is around the negative impact of having so many hotels controlled by Nama or bank-appointed receivers. Webster is sanguine, perhaps a nod to the fact that Carton House’s owners have their own financial challenges.
“If a hotel goes into receivership, it goes into receivership. My view is let the market decide,” he says.
“Some Irish hoteliers think the whole ills of the industry are down to Nama and the banks. My experience of Irish hoteliers is that they moan about everything. They moan about the weather when their efforts should be on how do we grow demand for this industry.
“What alternative is there? All I focus on is growing the business and growing the profit. That’s what all [Irish] hoteliers should be doing.”
Friday interview
Name: David Webster
Job: General manager, Carton House
Age: 40
Lives: Glencullen, Dublin
Family: Married with two children – Charlie and Holly.
Hobbies: Support West Ham football club
Something that might surprise: "When I came back to Ireland, I joined a Gaelic team (Stars of Erin in Glencullen) and played for two years, but I had to give up because I was just too old. You think of running for the ball, but by the time you process it somebody else has got it."
Something you might expect:"I love the game of golf." He plays off a handicap of 14.
