Business owners and staff share their thoughts and feelings the day after the First Minister announced even tougher measures on Scotland’s bars and restaurants.
Among them is Carol Fowler of the Banchory Lodge hotel, who said: “It’s a bit disappointing that it’s a blanket coverage and they haven’t considered looking at areas in a more strategic way.
“The hospitality industry has been hit really hard over this pandemic and, although we understand the restrictions and why they’re doing it, we do feel some of them are really disruptive to our business. At a time when we’re just starting to recover it has been really difficult and quite disappointing.”
Willie Cameron of Loch Ness Marketing and the Cobbs Group of hotels, restaurants and cafes, said: “At the end of the day people who don’t know the business will say, ‘It’s only for two weeks’, yeah but we’ve had it for seven months and there are a lot of businesses teetering on the brink and hanging on a cliff edge.
“With the end of the furlough scheme there’ll be massive redundancies. It’s going to decimate the whole of our industry. There’s levels of optimism as far as the future is concerned, but there’s another winter coming up and it’s not looking that healthy for 2021 at the moment. Cash is on the table but how do we access it, how do we get it and will everybody get their fair just rewards?”
