The return of the Corran ferry has come too late for Luke Alexander, managing partner of The Inn at Ardgour.
The inn, beside Ardgour’s harbour slip, has been for sale since the summer of 2022, but has seen interest dry up since the village’s car ferry went out of service.
This has left Luke and his business, in the absence of a buyer and a ferry, battling with a reduced income, heading into a winter in which it ‘will be about assessing where we are’.
“We had 10, 12, 14 people look around the place. We had a couple who had us down in their last two, so we had people interested,” Luke says.
“But since the ferry, we have had nothing.”
“It doesn’t take a genius to know that people who want a hotel in the west Highlands are investing their life savings. If there are two hotels and the second one, which may not be as nice as ours, isn’t reliant on a ferry, you are going to go for the one that doesn’t have a ferry fiasco.”
Turnover at the hotel after a summer of ferry cancellations is at least 25 per cent below what is expected. One of the hotel’s key income sources, evening meals, has dropped from its usual April to October level of 60 to 90 meals a night to between 30 and 40.
While rooms are still ‘relatively busy’, it has been achieved with a drop in the room rate to encourage customers.
The financial consequences of this poor season are far-reaching.
“With interest rates going up, the mortgage on the house up, we are probably going to the bank with cap in hand to get through the winter. And that is more interest we are having to pay and less profit next year. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Luke says.
“You need a good season, and we would have had that this year if it hadn’t been for the ferry. Easter, when the ferry was back on, we were rammed. We were turning people away. It was looking like being tremendous. Then the ferry broke on Easter Friday. It has never recovered from that.”
The ferry debacle has left Luke working 100 hour weeks until a buyer can be found. However, the decision to sell the Inn at Ardgour, which Luke and his family took over in June 2003, was made earlier after two years of different setbacks.
A significant investment in the building structure was completed in January 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic began, then a fire sparked by a tumble drier in July 2021 meant the doors were closed for a further nine months.
“The idea of building it up again, at 57, was not something I wanted to do. And after Covid, like many people, we wanted to spend more time with family,” Luke says.
He adds that where once he might have made a six-figure profit from selling, now it would be simply a matter of achieving a clean slate. It would need another 10-12 years to get him back to where he was, he estimates.
Despite his own troubles in the past years, Luke does believe the next owner of the Inn at Ardgour can succeed if the ferry problem can be solved.
“If a couple is wanting to work hard, with a structurally sound building, you can make a good living.
“That is where we would have been without those three problems of Covid, the fire, and the ferry.”