The Old Inn marks 400 years
The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn celebrates its 400th year in business in 2014 and Russell Campbell has been to the Co. Down village to talk to director, Garvan Rice, about the challenge of maintaining and marketing a centuries-old hotel to the modern consumer…
Unwary travellers could be forgiven for not expecting Crawfordsburn.
A pleasant, winding stretch of tree-lined carriageway that eventually spills out at the head of the old settlement’s busy main street gives nothing away to visitors. They emerge suddenly from shady countryside into a picturesque village where whitewashed walls and a profusion of thatched roofs hint at the area’s long and colourful history.
The village of Crawfordsburn originated in the 17th century as a small settlement on an important trade route and, developed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by the Sharman-Crawford family, it was much frequented in Victorian times by visitors on the railway to nearby Helen’s Bay.
There is one building which has sat at the heart of the village since the early 17th Century. It would have been hard for anyone living at that time to imagine the year 2014, as the aptly named Old Inn prepares to celebrate its 400th year in business. Built around an old coaching house that was established on the spot in 1614, the modern 34-bedroom, five-star hotel is well known today as a high-end wedding venue with an enviable reputation for destination dining.
From the moment visitors step under the low ceilings of the Old Inn’s cosy, wood-panelled lobby and feel the warm glow of its open hearth, they’ll sense that air of timeless authority that only comes with buildings which are truly old.
Rightly regarded as venue for destination dining, the majority of the hotel’s accommodation business comes from local families looking for excellent food in memorable surroundings. Since 2000, the Old Inn has consistently held 2AA rosettes – the only Ulster restaurant to manage this.
All 34 of its rooms are individually modelled, nine of them contain true four-poster beds and a further 12 have canopied or half-tester beds. Each room is equipped with everything that exacting guests would expect to find in a modern hotel, but all of them retain a carefully-crafted ambience that’s perfectly in tune with the building’s ancient roots.
Since 1983, the hotel has been owned and run by the Rice family. Danny Rice bought the premises – at that time, a 16-bedroom hotel with only eight en-suite rooms – because he saw its business potential and in the years since, he has spearheaded work to transform the venue into one of Northern Ireland’s leading hotel experiences.
“You’ll always hear that Danny is very ‘hands-on’ in the business today,” remarks Danny’s son, Garvan , who works closely with brother, Paul, to ensure the smooth day-to-day running of the Old Inn. “The family dynamic is very important here. We spend a lot of time talking to our customers, finding out where they are from and what they’re doing and we use that customer insight to help us develop our business, things like menu offerings and room layout.”
It’s a well-established strategy and it’s paid dividends for the hotel throughout its recent history. The business grew steadily between 1983 and 2008 when, like many in the hospitality sector, the Old Inn faced the cold realities of the economic crash. It acted quickly, however, tailoring a new range of customer offers, restructuring its management team and pressing its suppliers for the keenest deals possible.
They also faced a threat to their well-established wedding business as hard-pressed operators everywhere rushed to tap the market. That led to a “diffused and diluted” wedding offering all over Northern Ireland, says Garvan:
“It was a hard time to be selling weddings, but we stuck by our principles of quality and consistent delivery and we just focused on what we were good at. We’ve seen that determination pay off. We held our price point because we knew we could deliver quality against all this undercutting, and it worked in our favour because it drove many of the higher-spend wedding parties to our door.”
Garvan has been working in the family business since 2010, when he left a 20-year career with IBM as a saleman and consultant to join his father and brother in the thriving hotel. He says that he was surprised to find that many of the problems he encountered when working in global IT were similar to the challenges he has since faced while running a 400-year-old hotel:
“Ninety-nine per cent of success and failure is down to people,” he remarks. “You get the people part right, the rest is easy. We’ve had to make some very tough decisions in the last four years. The recession really started to bite hard as I arrived and we simply had to tighten our belts and lean on our suppliers to get the best value for our customers.
“It was a mix of brand loyalty and re-investment in our employees that kept us going. We set up more training and mystery shopping to keep our restaurant and bar sharp and focused. We sat down and created loyalty deals with our main suppliers for resale products and renegotiated a lot of our operational and infrastructure contracts.”
Much of the Old Inn’s reputation – and its economic success – is built around its suitability as a high-end wedding venue.
“This is something that’s been immensely beneficial to us over the years,” adds Garvan. “Our unique heritage and our lovely village location have helped us really grow our wedding business. In one wedding last year, we had four generations of brides from the same family and all of them were married at the Old Inn! There aren’t many places in Ireland that can boast that kind of brand loyalty!”
The hotel’s reputation as a luxury wedding location will be further secured next year when a £1.8m re-development of its Waterfall Suite gets underway.
Looking towards the future, Garvan says that the Old Inn is entering a new era; leaner and more cost-effective than ever before with deeper insights into current and emerging markets and an increasingly intuitive approach to technology:
“Our website has been redesigned and has some great content including 360-degree guest tours,” he says. “We have a fantastic wedding zone being launched in phase two and a staff login zone set for phase three to help with communication and training for our service and back-of-house teams.”
It’s all far removed from the Old Inn’s humble origins as a 17th century coaching inn and Garvan concedes that to stay successful, “we have to be as nimble as our customers in every aspect of the game”. But he also cautions that however much new technology begins to prevail in any business, it can never take the place of truly personal customer service:
“Even in today’s modern world, there is nothing to beat shaking hands with satisfied customers, writing letters, hugging people, carrying suitcases or running to the car park with an umbrella to help guests through the rain. The tech injection in this ancient hotel is a modern-day requirement, but it’s also there to help free us up to do these personal things for our guests.”
The Old Inn’s 400th year will be marked in the autumn by a special gala evening. Details, including the date, are still under wraps but a number of very special guests are expected to be in attendance. A range of specially-branded hotel merchandise has also been produced to mark this remarkable anniversary.
