Gloom in hospo: 'We're staring down the barrel of a dead summer'

Saturday, 4 December 2021

A co-ordinated communications strategy, like that deployed during Covid-19, is required to ensure everyone plays their part in reducing their carbon footprint (file photo).

“January is going to be awful. We’re staring down the barrel of a dead summer,” said Rene Beijer, owner of Thirty Nine Café in Auckland's Ponsonby Road.

Beijer had a strong first day of the traffic light system on Friday, but he did not believe the summer would be anywhere near so rosy.

“Ponsonby Road was dreadfully quiet. You expect past nine o’clock that it would be heaving. I was expecting to get some overflow from other establishments,” Beijer said.

He didn’t get it.

“If that's what is to come I’m scared.”

* Hospitality workers are being thrown to the wolves under the traffic light system

* Covid-19: Govt still not certain how use of vaccine passes will be enforced

Are bars and eateries in central Auckland scanning vaccine passes on day one of the traffic light system? Stuff finds out.

“We actually had one of our best days. We had a couple of bookings, so we did incredibly well,” Beijer said.

But, he said: “October, November, December; that’s when you get your functions. That’s where you make your war chest to cover January and February, which are slow.

Rene Beijer, owner of Thirty Nine Cafe on Ponsonby Road in Auckland, is pleased to be open again, but says the prospect of a quiet summer scares the city’s cafe and restaurant owners.

The last two months were appalling for cafe and restaurant owners, data from the Restaurant Association showed, and even if the next couple of weeks go well, Beijer said: “We have no international tourism. I doubt we will get any domestic tourism.”

January scared everybody, he said.

After the first national covid lockdown ended last year, and moved into alert level 1, Ponsonby exploded back to life, Beijer said.

“Ponsonby traded at 120 per cent. People had been stuck at home for so long, they just wanted to get out.”

But not this time round, he said.

Moving to the traffic light system came a week too late for Priyanka Agarwal, who closed Mink Café on Parnell Road last week, after four years in business.

“It was just getting too stressful, so we had to decide. The dues with the landlord were getting so high, we thought it was better to give up now,” she said.

Restaurant Association chief executive Marisa Bidois said it was only a matter of time before it became cheaper to grab a takeaway than to make the same meal at home.

“Things were getting above and beyond,” she said.

“To sustain, whether you have customers, or you don’t have customers, you have to full stock, full staff, and everything.”

Losing money each week, and facing a quiet summer, she said: “How do we keep going on?”

November had been especially hard for restaurants and cafes, data from the Restaurant Association showed.

A survey of hospo businesses in November, answered by 1159 business owners, reported that revenue in November was down by an average of 31 per cent on the previous month.

Compared to November 2020, it was down 42 per cent during the month.

Restaurant owner Krishna Botica says the vaccine passport system had worked well on day one of the traffic light system.

“75 per cent of respondents claimed that their health and wellbeing had been compromised,” said association chief executive Marisa Bidois.

Stress from drops in revenue was exacerbated by a “challenging” shift to the traffic light system, she said.

“On top of that, our industry has had to get up to speed with the new traffic light framework which been incredibly challenging. Clear information has not been forthcoming which has left businesses unsure of the specific policies that support the framework.”

“Feedback from our members from the first day of trading has been mixed,” Bidois said.

“Whilst some businesses have been quiet, others have reported being booked out today, and over the weekend,” she said.

Many businesses have reported challenges with the vaccine passports, Bidois said, and rudeness from a small subset of unvaccinated people.

Krishna Botica, owner of Café Hanoi, XuXu, Saan, and Ghost Street in Auckland, said: “The vaccine certificate systems we had all went smoothly. The only problems we had were computers that forgot what they were doing, and staff who forgot what they were doing.”

“We had weird stuff happening at every single site,” Botica said.

Business was around 35-40 per cent lower than pre-Covid levels, she said.

Hospo businesses with outdoor seating were blessing the fine weather in Auckland yesterday.

“The weather was amazing,” she said. “We had a pretty good run for the outdoor spaces.

“There were very few walk-ins. People are relying on bookings,” she said.

But some rude people made bookings, and then did not turn up.

“That's very painful,” Botica said.

Botica said: “It's very annoying when you really need the business. It’s fine when people notify you, because you do get some walk-ins who do need tables.”