Hotelier of the week: Sarah Gibbs

ABTN speaks to Sarah Gibbs, general manager of the Swan Hotel and Spa in the Lake District, which was devastated by a flood last year and has recently reopened after a £4m renovation.

So what happened to the hotel?

On the night of November 19th last year, we flooded overnight. It was quite scary. The river must have risen eight or nine feet to get to our door. It had been raining solidly for about two weeks, and they had given all these flood warnings, but how we flooded was unbelievable, because the water table rose so high that the water came up through the floor. The first we knew of it was when we heard the water whooshing up the lift shaft. It was really loud. Then it started to seep up through the floor and before we knew it we were part of the river.

How long did it take to reach your door?

The river burst its banks and came over to our driveway at two or three in the morning, but it wasn't really near our door at that point. A couple of hours later we started to flood. It was really early in the morning. Fortunately, we had relocated the guests who were staying on the ground floor to rooms upstairs, the night before. Some of them left the night before, when they heard the news that we were likely to flood.

How did people get out of the hotel?

The fire service evacuated everybody through the pub window, on the ground floor. The fire service evacuated everybody. They were all tied to each other in a line and we even had a baby with us, in a car seat. By 7.30 in the morning everyone was out of the building.

Where were you at the time?

It was a Friday and I was actually on my day off, doing my HGV test to drive my horse around. I got the phonecall saying what should we do, and I said turn the electricity off and evacuate everybody out, that's all you can do. I was down in Cheshire and was at the hotel by 9am. It was quite tricky to get up to the lakes, as a lot of the roads were blocked. I was lucky as I was in a four-wheel drive so could go down country lanes and through rivers.

What happened next?

We had to contact the guests who were booked in, which was really difficult. The way we flooded meant we didn't have any time to salvage any information, and afterwards they wouldn't let us back in the building.

The receptionist had brought the reservations list for that night, and I managed to get back into the building to get the forthcoming reservations for the next week. November is fortunately one of our quieter times of year, but it was still really challenging. We needed the information to contact all these people who were due to be coming to stay, but you can't turn your computer on because it's all wet. So we took all the hard copy that we had, and went and sat in the pub across the road to ring all the people who were due to be coming to stay with us. We managed to phone everybody who was due to arrive that weekend. All the media coverage was a bit further along in Cockermouth, so lots of people had no idea that it had hit here as well.

Then our minds turned to getting the building dried out.

How long did that take?

As soon as the water was gone, which was by the Tuesday, we needed to get all the drying equipment in and get the building dried out. By the Tuesday the water had subsided. So many people who came to look at it said it was the cleanest flood they had ever seen. We were very lucky in the fact that it wasn't all sludgy and horrible.

We had had the insurance assessor up on the Monday and we had appointed a company to do the work. They come in, take everything out of your building and catalogue it, saying whether it needs to be scrapped or is salvageable. That all started happening on the Tuesday.

We finished drying the building on December 24. It took five weeks, which is very quick, apparently.

Were there any surprises?

There are a few things that you don't think about at the time - it's so overwhelming - such as the chemicals for the swimming pool. Our plant rooms got breached, but we had moved the chemicals away from the flood and they were collected by the environment agency. All your acids and alkalines - you don't want to be mixing them and making chlorine gas.

What were the challenges later on?

My biggest concern was my staff. You feel very strongly that you have a duty of care to these people. They've worked hard for you. There were about 90 staff members and we managed to keep them all on. That was my biggest relief, when the insurance company said they would be paying out for business interruption, which covered staff wages. It didn't cover all of them, as it is based on a forecast from the budget from last year, and we had grown as a business since the year before. We calculated it all out and managed to keep everybody on at 75% pay. We couldn't afford 100%. They understood, and had to agree to it. We looked after everybody as best we could. We've got such a strong team now, who are very committed to the hotel.

Where did the staff go while the repair work was carried out?

We relocated the offices for the management team and the reception team to my back bedroom. Relocating them off site was a challenge in itself, but as soon as we got that up and running we cracked on with cancelling the rest of our bookings, and making future bookings for when we reopened. The management team worked all day every day, because there was so much to do, and to be honest everyone became a Jack of all trades.

When did the hotel reopen?

We reopened the hotel as a whole on May 7, just over six months after the flood. It was a £4 million renovation project. About £3.7 million of that was our insurance claim, and we had already put in place a plan to refurbish our top floor bedrooms and put air conditioning in. The ground floor was being done as part of the insurance claim, so we thought we might as well do the middle floor as well. We've made some quite dramatic changes to the hotel. It looks completely different to how it used to look. It's kind of cool but old fashioned... country chic. It's a really nice relaxed atmosphere and we're now the only hotel in the lake district that offers air conditioning throughout.

What was the reaction when the hotel reopened?

There's been a lot of excitement, we've been very busy. We actually have a proper pub in our hotel, which you don't really find in most hotels, so we have quite a strong local clientele. It's been an absolute roaring success and business is going great.

Have your conference and event clients come back?

We've been open for only a few months, and it's only now that we're starting to look at attracting our business customers back. They will be the more difficult ones to attract back. We had quite a good corporate base of people who used to come and stay with us, but they will have had to have meetings and used other venues. I think we will get them back. We're 45 minutes from Preston, 1.5 hours from Manchester, just off junction 36 of the M6 motorway. I think our conference and events team is better than ever, and we're in a position to deliver a better service than ever. When business travellers come back we'll feel that the hotel is really back on its feet.

What advice would you offer a hotelier faced with your situation?

The key thing I would say to people is you need to look after your staff, and they will look after you. That is a big thing for me. I feel we had a terrible tragedy and we made the absolute best of it.

www.swanhotel.com