Wellington Evidence Favours Decision Made In Whakatane

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 83, 16 August 1950, Page 5

Wellington Evidence Favours Decision Made In Whakatane

• The attitude taken by the Whakatane Borough Council to the establishment of an hotel is, to some extent, endorsed by evidence given before the Licensing Control Commission by Mr A. L. McLean, Secretary of the company which controls the St George Hotel, Wellington. Mr McLean said the St George which had been operating for 19 years, was built and equipped, 1 apart from furnishings, for £119,000. One architect’s estimate was that today’s replacement cost was £260,000. In the last five years £45,000 had been spent on repairs, maintenance and improvements. The hotel was leased for about 11 years, but had been conducted by the company itself since 1941. It had been affected by the depression. There had been no pay-out to ordinary shareholders in its 19 years’ operation, though arrears of preference dividend had been adjusted by compromise. The company had been trading at a profit for a few years.

An important factor in the high cost of running a hotel was the cost of staff, said Mr McLean. A hotel sold service rather than goods, and the cost of labour had risen far more than any other cost—it had more than doubled over the last eight or nine years. Mr McLean said that for weekends, Christmas and New Year the

demand for guest accommodation was relatively light. Accommodation was fully taxed only midweek, so that the average occupancy of beds for the year was only 69 per cent.