Irelands – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

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DUBLIN – When Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the gradual reopening of the hospitality industry in June, hotel managers like Niall Coffey breathed a sigh of relief.

Ireland’s tourism and hospitality industries were hardest hit during the pandemic, and previous attempts to reopen have been weighed down by new waves of Covid-19.

“I think we have no choice but to stay open at this stage because financially we really need to do this,” said Coffey, general manager of Harvey’s Point, a four-star hotel in Donegal, North West Ireland.

Apart from brief reopenings last summer and Christmas, bars, restaurants and hotels have largely been closed since March 2020.

Now that the vaccination campaign is gathering pace, Coffey and others are preparing for June 2nd when they can start letting some guests through the doors again. Bars and restaurants can then be opened in the following weeks, albeit with restrictions on the number and guidelines for indoor and outdoor meals.

Des O’Dowd, owner of Inchydoney Island Lodge & Spa in Cork, said companies have incurred a great deal of expense over the past year trying to reopen safely.

“They are trying to return groceries to vendors. We closed twice, going through fruits and vegetables and throwing them away or trying to find a home for them. We were closed and the beer ran out,” he told CNBC.

“It’s an expensive process to start and stop and do it all over again now would be heartbreaking. I hope that is the case, that we open up and there is no going back.”

The government has now recognized that the hospitality and tourism industries, a major employer in Ireland, will need further support even after the restrictions are lifted. Tourism was valued at around 9.3 billion euros ($ 11.3 billion) for the Irish economy in 2019, with 2 billion euros in tourism-related taxes paid to the treasury.

Food and supplies aside, many hotels and bars have had to invest in renovations and equipment to ensure compliance with Covid guidelines.

“This time last year we really faced a stranger. We were trying to measure six feet with tape measure and we had to buy a lot of partitions between the tables,” said O’Dowd.

Now, he said the hotel has a better understanding of what a safe reopening looks like, including providing antigen testing to the hotel’s 225 employees, adding to the cost of reopening and staying open.

Domestic visitors

Hotel managers and tourism industry workers hope the general public will share their enthusiasm for the reopening.

With international travel still effectively ceased, the country’s tourism industry relies on domestic visitors and “stays” during the summer months, but this will only last so long.

Coffey said he could not rely solely on domestic visitors for an extended period of time and that U.S. visitors are usually a major market group for his business.

“The golf business would have been pretty good for us in the summer season when we can get high rates (prepandemic). That’s gone,” he said.

He added that the hotel has had some bookings for September and October from American guests who are optimistic that international travel will reopen soon.

That could still come to fruition. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the end of April that the EU would allow fully vaccinated US visitors to enter the block.

“It’s great to see Europe talking about opening up and Britain is a little ahead of us. I think that’s a big advantage for us that we can see in the real world what happens a few weeks ahead of us,” said O. ‘Dowd added.

“Hopefully, in the UK and wherever these things are tested, very positive things will happen and we will get good results.”

International tourism

Niall Gibbons, executive director of the government agency Tourism Ireland, said the planned EU digital green certificate – or vaccination cards in a few quarters – is a step in the right direction to make international travel possible again.

Tourism Ireland is a joint government agency between Ireland and Northern Ireland whose job it is to promote the island of Ireland to overseas visitors.

According to the group, overseas tourist spending in Ireland in 2019 was 5.8 billion euros ($ 7 billion), with 325,000 people employed in the sector. It is therefore important to reopen the country in the second half of the year.

The EU certificate would allow visitors from other countries to check their vaccination or negative test status upon arrival in an EU country.

“There are other factors that will be required before the international (travel) restart gets underway. First and foremost, we need to work with the government on a roadmap,” Gibbons told CNBC.

Photo taken in Ireland, Cork

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“There are factors such as the mandatory hotel quarantine, the applicable test regime, air connectivity and restarting.”

Ireland introduced mandatory hotel quarantine earlier this year, which requires people entering the country from certain locations to be quarantined in a hotel for two weeks. The system presents a number of challenges.

“Quarantine and tourism don’t go hand in hand,” Gibbons said. He added that he supports a plan similar to the EU traffic light system in place last year, indicating which countries have lower infection rates and travel safer.

“Ultimately, this is the place we all want to be across the European Union,” he said.

Banks in sync

Fintech operators or neo-banks have taken the baton for instant payments, leaving many of the incumbents behind to regain market share.

A consortium of Irish banks – at least AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB and KBC – are trying to win back some of this customer base with their own app.

The app, tentatively titled Synch, enables instant payments between accounts at any bank.

The banks involved were excited about the project, but Michael Dowling, a professor of finance at Dublin City University, told CNBC that the prospect raises some warnings about the competition.

According to Dowling, the Synch app looks like a closed shop where the banks want to “set up a system in which they can essentially exclude others from this payment network”.

He added that mechanisms such as SEPA Instant are already in place for banks in Europe to make instant payments.

The banks’ synchronization proposal is currently with the Irish Watchdog, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. An initial submission by the banks was rejected by the supervisory authority due to missing details. A second registration took place shortly afterwards.

The Banking & Payments Federation Ireland, an industry group that coordinates synchronization efforts with banks, declined to comment, citing the CCPC process.

Future of competition

Instant payments may be one thing that has cornered fintech companies, but question marks still hover over the future of long-term loans and mortgages in the country.

N26 is committed to lending in other markets but has not brought these services to Ireland.

“We are a fully licensed bank so it is obviously interesting for us to understand what suite of products in this area could work in the Irish market,” said Gormley.

“Given the news from Ulster Bank and KBC and the very dramatic shift in Irish banking, we obviously need to consider how and what we would offer to the Irish market.”

Dowling said the outlook for competition in the Irish banking sector is bleak amid the dwindling number of banks – but Starling Bank, another relative newcomer to the fintech scene, has long promised to enter the market and is aiming for its banking license the Central Bank to Bank of Ireland.

“I don’t think there’s a real possibility that another bank is popping up right now,” Dowling said, adding that other European banks are unlikely to be drawn to the market.

He added that regulation was needed to prevent monopoly behavior by the remaining banks.

“It’s this longer-term borrowing that we’re getting stuck with, there is no competition. There are three banks and it really is. This is where regulation needs to be put in place and we need to think creatively about how to fix this,” he said .

“This is the change we need because there won’t be an outside savior. Maybe some of the fintech firms will develop in due course, but we really need forced competition.”