Paying too much money?

Sitting having a chat with a couple of HOTELIERS the other night and we got talking about how much money we pay into the system, one HOTEL owner was telling me that he had paid the government in one way or another £86000.00 more than he had paid himself!!at first i sat there in disbelief but, when he started adding it all up i started to think Christ!! he is right.

Let's have a look at what he is paying, Business Rates, now we all know that we are being ripped of in Conwy for that one, VAT,Refuse Collection,His own Personal Tax,P.A.Y.E. Fuel Duty,Insurance Premium Tax,Staff National Insurance Contributions,Alcohol Licence Fee,Tourist board Fee,Car Tax,Corporation Tax,Climate Levy Charge on Utility Bills,Water Rates,and Council Tax on his private apartment within the hotel,.

No wonder he is pissed off with sending Money off to one government dept or other,and what if he closes his hotel down as he is often thinking about?, as one department or other is constantly giving him grief and trying to stop him from earning a living, What then!!! i tell you what!! the bloody government is going to loose out to the tune of £86000.00 and he will become another statistic,counted in some totally useless department that puts nothing into the economy of Llandudno or anywhere else for that matter.

It's about time someone woke up and realised that businesses in this area put in a hell of a lot more than they take out, and we should be getting help,not picked on at every opportunity.

I wish i had a job in some cushy dept within the walls of local or national government where i could work 5 days a week with no stress and retire at 60 on a bloody good pension take about 5 weeks holiday PAID and never have to wory about the state of the economy ,the state of the town,or the state of the country.

what have i got to look forward to?? retirement at about 70 years of age?(if i am Lucky)i can then think of trying to find some daft bugger and talk them into buying my business and then probably hand most of that over in TAX, retire on a state pension of about £35.00 and that will probably get me a loaf of bread and and a bottle of milk!

Oh well maybe i can find a cheap B&B in town and steal all the tea and coffee, or perhaps live on a caravan park and pay no tax at all, according to Jeremy Vine today North Wales is Flooded with such places.

Blue Flag Llandudno

Here is an e-mail that a fellow HOTELIER sent to me today,are the people who are running our town intent on total self destruction,i walk around this town every day and can see the failings why can't they? are they so blind to it? or are they just to lazy to get up from the desks that they live behind and do something?.

The only time i have seen anyone in authority they have been stuffing their faces at some freebie or another, then they will chat to you for a few minutes pretending to be interested whilst scanning the buffet over your shoulder to make sure it's not all gone and then you know that nothing will happen because they are to busy organising the next jolly or other.

Roll on the next election let's kick this lot out and then get to the executives at CCBC.and roll some heads before it's to late.


Hi **********
Below is an email I have received this morning and have lost a booking worth £1200 for next year, because of our beaches.

Don’t know if it is of interest or not, Hope you are well

J********

Hi



I just wanted to let you know that we are not going to make a booking. The property looks great but I not happy about the cleanliness of the beach water around that area. We had a bad experience in Guernsey two years ago re sewage and the fact that Llandudno has lost its blue flag status does not bode well. I think it is shocking in our day and age we still have a water system that allows sewage to be dumped in times of high rain. I know it is a problem in many parts of the UK but if you get any opportunity, please forward my comments to local tourist boards etc.



Thanks for your help and I am sorry to have wasted your time.



Best Regards
Elaine

Good Food Guide.

We had some friends to stay this week and took them out to a few places to eat, all in all everything was fine,but 2 places in particular were excellent,first was the Queens Head at Glanwydden,Brilliant food served piping hot by very friendly staff,a bit more expensive than your average pub meal but well worth every penny,each time i go there the standard is good and the beer is also top notch.

Next night we went to the Empire Hotel and had a meal at the poolside £15.00 per head with wine and coffee you can't argue with that,again served by very good staff Lilly is always on the ball at that place, the Maddocks have got a good one there, they better look after her or we will poach her!!.

One of our friends is now a retired accountant and when ever we go out it's always his job to work out the bill! it's become a bit of a joke now, and one of the other guys is a gynecologist and always moans that nobody ever asks him to ply his ex trade at the dinner table!!!

only a couple of weeks left now and I'm going to sod off and annoy some poor hotelier or guest house owner,somewhere after all i have a whole years worth of cunning tricks to try out i just hope i don't end up staying somewhere with a miserable old git like me as a landlord or there is gonna be trouble!!!

Crime pays for Holidays!!!

It is very sad that at this time of year the behaviour of some people seems to get worse, or is it that we just don't notice it in the summer, the amount of yobs wandering around openly swearing and being abusive to others is appalling,why are they coming here? who is paying for them? who is responsible for them? and why do the authorities seem to do nothing about it?

I watched one yob today openly shouting and abusing a community policewoman, are they so powerless to do anything about it? or are they just in the wrong job?.

In my day you had respect for anyone in authority and you would never dream of answering back! never mind arguing in public with them you would have been taken away.

I have just been reading a local newspaper from an area near a big city that i know well, that a guest left for me to read, and he told me that every week the press publish the names and crimes of all those that go to the local magistrates court in an effort to embarrass them, but it would seem that all it is doing is giving them hero status amongst their piers, here are 3 edited entries.

Daniel ******** 20 of Elizabeth Terrace
Pleaded Guilty of being drunk and disorderly in ****** Town centre and also of being in possession of a class b drug and failing to surrender to police bail!!!!.

He was Fined £50.00 Wow!!!

Now compare that with the very next entry!!
George *******21 of Blandford Grove
Guilty of driving without a valid test certificate and using a mobile phone while driving.
Fined £685.00

Now i know that the second guy still broke the law but sodding hell what harm was he doing compared to the fist yob!! then compare them both with the next one.

Paul ******** No fixed abode
Guilty of stealing scaffolding piping worth £3950.00 a lawn mower garden furniture a washing machine and £700.00 worth of criminal damage.

Ordered to undertake treatment at a drug dependency unit and fined £150.00

No doubt the unit is probably somewhere in North Wales and you may soon have him as a neighbor!!!

Digital Switch over

I thought that with all the advertising and banners scattered over town that i could believe the hype, and we would be switching over on the 21st October,Well apparently not! we wont be switching over until the 2nd December and why?? Because we don't get our signal from the Conwy Transmitter we get our signal from Winter hill, as i expect many in Llandudno do, we can get a very faint picture on the Conwy transmitter but you couldn't watch it.

With all this in mind why has so much money been thrown at giving us incorrect information? why has nobody from Digital realised that in some places there will be towns that can't get a signal from there nearest transmitter?.

On the Digital web site it says the CONWAY transmitter is variable and only has 16 channels, WHOOPIE, that will be great!! i bet all you can get is the shopaholic channel, Gay Rabbit, and BBC9, that only comes on after 10pm and shows old episodes of crossroads,

Sod it! I'm fed up with this whole tv crap, I'm going to pull them out of all the rooms and put a compendium set in each one, they can play Ludo all night!!!

Rotary Line In A Spin!!!!

Although i do moan sometimes, (well a lot actually) about some of our guests, in the main they are pretty good, but it would be boring to talk about the nice ones, so i will carry on moaning about the more interesting ones,

Now my wife has got the patience of a saint,and being married to me, some would say that she bloody well needs it!, but this weekend almost pushed her over the edge, we had 2 groups in this week about 30 or so from a club called something like the Rotary spinners, and another group celebrating a 60th,and my god what a difference in the way the 2 groups behaved ,spinners first.

After checking them in they all decided to swap rooms!, i did start to wonder what sort of group they were? )(swingers or Spinners),But after a while and 53 visits to reception things started to settle down, that is until we had to order 12 taxis, now you try getting 1 taxi at 730pm on a Friday night never mind 12, anyway after about an hour or so they were all gone only to return at about 1230 am waking up almost everyone in Llandudno with the banging doors and running between rooms,

Next Morning i thought we had 700 people in for breakfast, they all decided to hit us at once!! Then started get Shitty with us because there was a Que at the buffet!, then the finger clicking started (my pet hate) as they started a competition as to who could order the most stupid breakfast, the winner hands down was the self proclaimed leader of the spinners who won with the following 2 Smoked Kippers, with poached egg, sausages, mushrooms, hash brown, and beanz,!!! I mean for Christ's sake how can you eat that!.

50 gallons of decaf tea, & coffee, later, because every single couple decided to have one tea, and one coffee, and refused to Share with anyone else on their table, and we were nearly there and it was only 1045am, the 60th birthday group were now half way up the Orme waiting for the bus to take them to summit complex for fish, and chips!!!, just 2 hours of cleaning the dining room and we could get working on the rooms.

yep you guessed it!! i thought a bomb had gone off!! in most of the rooms why don't some people have a bit of respect, one woman had even decided to dye her hair black and used one of our bath sheets to do it with,Tea bags left lying around all over dressing tables mountains of newspapers bins full of bottles of wine and pizza boxes (why do they do that they wouldn't do it at home) any way by 4pm we were tidy again and the 60th groups rooms didn't even look like anyone had slept in them,

5pm the reception starts kicking off as they all get back from wherever they had been destroying all day, then Mr Spinner leader collars me in the entrance, and informs me that they would like me to provide 30 wine glasses in the bar for them at 7.30pm as they will be drinking their own wine tonight"!! i nearly hit the sodding roof CHEEKY sods, where do they think they are?? i wouldn't go into the Kings Head order a glass and say oh it's OK i have my own beer tonight you just keep washing glasses for me.

Good job the wife was there as she could see the steam coming out of my ears she pushed me into a broom cupboard and locked me in till they were all gone, i have to say that it was like having a school group in i don't think they could even wipe their own arses without coming to reception and asking which hand would be best to use!.

130am still tyring to carry all the empty bottles of wine down to the bottle bins THAT WE DIDN'T Sell and cleaning all the nuts an crisps of the floor that they had stamped int my brand new bloody carpets, Ahh well they will be gone tomorrow just got to get through breakfast so i just got my head down (in a bowl of porridge) and got on with it.

The 60th birthday group all came and thanked me for a brilliant weekend all shook my hand and left the staff £50.00 tips and all went off happy.

The Spinners all pissed off and never said a sodding word, one of them left 7 pence on the top of the toilet cistern in one of the rooms and £500.00 in recyclable materials so all was well, just got to bolt the place back together as we have a group of paranoid schizophrenics ( i think that's how you spell it) Coming in today, i am looking forward to that and as soon as that cow of a wife let's me out of this cupboard I'm gonna get her (unless someone else gets ME first!!!!!!!!!.

Google To The Rescue

Having Now been forced into a corner i and a few other Hoteliers must Leave the Visit Wales scheme however i think we have a solution,Here are a few simple steps to get an honest grading for your HOTEL without all the bureaucratic rubish that comes from Visit Wales about what you can and can't call yourself.

1. Log on to Google type in the name of your Hotel and hit search Google maps

You will then get a result and star rating from Google not an opinion of a hotel inspector that may stay once every 3 years or so, and who you probably know!.

But an honest list of opinions from possibly hundreds of guests that have stayed with you.
My Hotel has over a hundred reviews and has a star rating i am happy with, its a true and honest opinion of our hotel by the people who matter, the guests.

Here is one to try, i just did it, go to Google maps and type in the Grand hotel Llandudno, Google give them 3 stars and they have 167 reviews i would say that the star rating is about right and the reviews seem to be recent

The reviews can't be altered or fixed and come from various sources including Trip Advisor Bookings.com Laterooms.com and google customers,

This is a great way to market your Hotel and is free, the information is published by google so i see no reason why it can't be used as promotional material for your business, i have e-mailed them and asked the question can i call myself a google graded hotel? i can't see why not as i can put the Trip Advisor grading on my web site, i think it would have a lot more Recognition internationally than the current tourist board one.

I also noted that the pioneer picked up on the story with a couple of Hoteliers giving good reason why they were unhappy, and what was the response from Visit Wales?

Nothing of any help coming forward the same response that i had we can re-grade you as a hotel, but as we don't have a swimming pool, a Gym Telephones in all the rooms a 24 hour reception and we lock the door at night we would probably get 2 stars if we were lucky service, cleanliness,customer satisfaction excellent customer reviews, high occupancy, and the ability to comunicate in english/welsh seems to go nowhere with them.............