At the Crown Hotel in Wells-on-Sea on the beautiful North Norfolk coast, Chris Coubrough is waiting patiently, again. The New Zealand chef and owner of the Crown says he can smell a shift in the sea air, a wave of optimism after one of the bloodiest years ever experienced by Britain’s holiday industry.
“You can sense a new mood of optimism percolating through the gloom. If the PM says hotels and the hospitality industry can open up in the spring when he sets out his roadmap out of lockdown on 22 February, then the mood will start bubbling again. And the phones will start ringing again off the hook. ”
And it doesn’t take much to swing the public’s mood. Coubrough says that within 48 hours of Matt Hancock saying at a recent TV press briefing that he would be holidaying in Cornwall this year, the phone started buzzing again after a long bleak winter.
