North Coast adapts to a new reality

Among those areas hit hardest by the current dearth of international tourism is NI’s famous North Coast. Causeway Coast and Glens Mayor, Mark Fielding, concedes that operators in the region have been hit hard but says the challenge now is to adapt to new market realities…

In areas where the income derived from international tourism is critical to the success of the local economy, the crippling effects of the ongoing pandemic are most obvious. Northern Ireland’s renowned north coast is a prime example.

For many months, visitors were unable to visit the region’s fabulous golf courses and beaches or sightsee along its world-famous Atlantic shoreline and a plethora of big revenue-generating events, including the North-West 200 and the SuperCup NI tournament, were cancelled.

Speaking to LCN this week, the Mayor of Causeway Coast and Glens, Alderman Mark Fielding, conceded that the local fallout from months of lockdown had been considerable:

‘The impact was very noticeable, we had lockdown in effect over the important Easter period, and there’s no doubt that was a big thing for us. I live in Portstewart so I saw exactly how we were affected.’

The council, which faced a debt burden of more than £70m in February this year, owns six caravan parks in the north coast area, including two large facilities in Portrush. All of these were closed when lockdown commenced in March and didn’t open again until early July. Mr Fielding reported that all the parks had been booked out for the remainder of the summer and that the weekends remained busy through September.

‘We did have a loss of revenue, our leisure centres were also all closed, but we have been very busy trying to recoup some of that since the facilities opened again,’ added the mayor.

‘We depend very much on tourism here, the north coast is Northern Ireland’s premier region, and the challenge is now for the hospitality sector and how they will cope through the winter…The council has now launched a marketing campaign designed to help local hospitality market their products to the NI and RoI audiences and we are working with hotels and restaurants to help them target key market sectors such as families.’

As for future prospects, Mr Fielding added:

‘I would like to be optimistic, but throughout the year we have not had our international tourists and we have really felt that. We now need to adapt to the changing situation. We need to be looking more closely at our own home market, there are lots of things here that people can still do, they can play golf on our great north coast courses, for example, and this is the kind of thing that we can continue to target going forward.’

The plight of Northern Ireland’s hospitality sector – and those business in the north coast and Glens of Antrim regions in particular – was cast in sharp contrast during August when the Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, visited the area in the company of Hospitality Ulster (HU) Chief Executive, Colin Neill and Chairman, Danny Coyles, himself a licensee with premises in Portstewart.

During the trip, Ms Dodds engaged with a series of hospitality and tourism businesses and attended a round table lunch in Ballycastle at which she learned first-hand about the difficulties many of them are facing because of the pandemic. The lunch was attended by representatives of HU, the NI Hotels Federation, the NI Tourism Alliance and the Taste Causeway Collaborative Growth Network.

The shadow chancellor also visited the Giant’s Causeway after which she said that she had been ‘overwhelmed’ by the friendliness of the welcome she had received:

‘It’s also clear to me that the tourism industry here is really struggling in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. The UK government’s decision to withdraw wage support across the economy in one fell swoop will only make things worse,’ she added.

‘Many businesses are set to lose support before they’ve been able to get back on their feet. The chancellor must think twice before more jobs go in sectors like tourism and hospitality both in Northern Ireland and across the UK.’