Hastings Hotels managing director James McGinn: cut me in half and I’ll have an ‘H’ inside me

The Co Tyrone man said: “Some call me James Hastings – cut me in half and I’ll have an ‘H’ inside me.

“The Hastings family have been really, really good to me. I was really close to Sir William.”

Sir William Hasting, who was given a knighthood in 2009, passed away in 2017 at the age of 89.

James, 56, continued: “I’ve worked with his children for the last 26 years, and you don’t work in this industry for just 35 hours a week, you end up being part of the fabric.

“I could ask them for anything, they’ve been good to me in good times and in bad – they’ve been really, really supportive.

“It’s a great honour and a big responsibility that they’ve placed in me.

“I’m sure they could have gone to the open market but they actually believe in what they say, they believe in training their own, rewarding and recognising the people that have helped them develop their business and who they’ve helped develop.”

The Killyclogher man has replaced Howard Hastings who is the group’s new chairman following the retirement of the longest serving director Edward Carson.

James now manages Hastings six hotels – Europa, Culloden, Ballygally, Everglades, Stormont and Grand Central.

He said: “It’s happened so seamlessly I sometimes don’t acknowledge that I’m the managing director.

“I’m not tied to a particular hotel, my role is very much at a group and strategic level, but I still love operations, I could never really leave a hotel.

“I still have an office in the Europa and the Culloden because I do like to be based at hotels.

“They know if they need me for anything they can just ask – I know how to run a pass, how to run an event, just don’t ask me to make the beds.”

During the pandemic the hospitality industry took a well-publicised kicking, but since January James said a “restart button” has been pressed.

“We’ve gone through such a rollercoaster since March 2020,” he said.

“We’ve just had to kind of hit the restart button and start looking at everything with fresh eyes, as managing director I’ve been able to do that along with the board.”

Asked if it feels like Covid is a thing of the past, James said: “It certainly feels like we’ve moved on from Covid.

“When we opened in July there was a huge increase in the domestic tourist market.

“We did open with a flurry that didn’t stop.

“I don’t think any of anticipated we were going to be quite so busy.

“That was right up until the schools went back, mid September into October.

“We were gearing towards a really strong Christmas – you still had your social distancing, you still had six to a table, you’d all the mitigations and risk assessments in the world in place.

“Then Omicron came and last Christmas was wiped out.”

He added: “The only day that held up for us really strongly was Christmas Day, in every single venue we were sold out with very few cancellations. Because it was families so there was no mixing involved.”

He added: “In January, February we saw a comeback. Movie tourism is really strong at the moment (where filming for a movie or TV series takes place in a region and their cast and crew are put up in local hotels).

“The tourist markets are beginning to travel again. We’ve just had a huge corporate event between the Europa and Grand Central.

“The meetings market is coming back. That confidence in the market is coming back.”

He commented: “It’s almost a case of – Covid is here, we’ve got to live with it, it’s becoming like a cold.

“We’re all forging on, destinations are opening, airline routes are opening.”

James added: “The biggest struggle we have at the moment is just the cost of everything – food, utilities, all sky high.

“The availability of products, lead in times have all quadrupled, everything is lagging because somebody in the supply chain just can’t get what you need in order to finish jobs.

“It’s very frustrating and doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.”

‘I like to go home and close the door’

Asked if he’s ever tempted to stay over in one of his hotels after a hard day’s work, James said: “No, I go home every night.

“I like to go home, I like to close the door, I just like to be able to have downtime there.

“I spend a lot of time at home, myself and my partner. I also go home to my family in Killyclougher.”

James, who lives in east Belfast, said: “I’ve lived here for about 20 years on Belmont Road. I just love this area.

“We don’t even have to go into town any more because everything is here at Belmont and Ballyhackamore.”

The new Hastings MD said he wasn’t the social animal who some people think: “I’ve a few close friends, I don’t have a huge amount of friends.

“People might think I’m this big gregarious guy who goes everywhere and knows everyone.”

James said that when he goes on holidays, he likes to stay in hotels rather than guesthouses or B&Bs, but he doesn’t expect any special treatment.

“I just book like a regular person, I’d pay the rate that everyone else does.

“I haven’t been in a B&B in years, I tend to always stay in hotels when I’m going away.”

Discussing the best places he’s stayed James said: “Probably the best hotel I ever stayed in has to be Sandy Lane in Barbados.

“The other hotel that I really love, I’ve been to it about four times, is Gleneagles in Scotland.

“They have the Mark Phillips School of Riding and the most amazing spa and great food.”

He said hotel rates like almost everything else in the world had increased: “I do hear people complaining about the rates, but people are willing to pay for them.

James, who graduated from the distinguished Hotel School at the University of Cornell in New York, added: “People would maybe have come and visited friends and relatives, stayed in a spare room. That’s no more.

“People want to experience a hotel again, they want to make it a holiday.

“We’ve missed out on so much, you just want to be spoiled and get someone looking after you.”

Screen return for James

James McGinn became a familiar face in households across NI thanks to BBC series ‘Lobby Lives’.

And he’s about to come back to the small screen thanks to a new series looking at how four NI hotels made it through lockdown.

He said: “People still talk about Lobby Lives like it was on last week, but it was 17 years ago.

“We had no idea it was going to do as well as it did, it was very well accepted by the public. I just hope they’re ready for the new show that’s about to come out.”

He said: “The new show, we think it’s going to be out in May or June, it’s going to be called ‘Hotel People’. It was filmed all of last year right up until the end of February.

“It’s about how we as a group have coped post-Covid. It focuses on four hotels – Grand Central, Europa, Slieve Donard, which is no longer ours, and the Culloden. It’s going to be six one-hour episodes going out on BBC at a national level.

He commented: “In Lobby lives I was quite central to all of it. I’ll still be in this one a bit but it’s a lot more characters. I hope it’s as well received as the other one.

James turned back on building trade to empty ashtrays

Having realised he wasn’t cut out for the building trade, James McGinn got his foot on the bottom rung of a different career ladder.

He recalled: “I’m one of 10 children, they all went to work for my dad in the building trade. I certainly wasn’t going to make it on the building site so my uncle Peter (McGlone) took me in to work at Knock-na-moe Castle Hotel in Killyclougher.

“I remember I was working at 15 on a Sunday. All I was allowed to do was clean tables and empty ashtrays. That gave me a real buzz.

“I grew a real fondness for this environment. The sociable aspect, and people, because I love people.

“As I got older it crept to a Saturday and suddenly I was not only working in the bar but waiting tables and then I got into the restaurant, then I got into banqueting, then I got helping at weddings, then all of a sudden I was working three nights a week doing everything.”

James graduated in 1988 from Queen’s University.

He said: “I went to London to train to be an accountant because my dad had all these builders and I was the one son who could be an accountant, that was his great dream.

“I didn’t last very long – I’d no one to speak to in work, you just had to do accounts.”

James returned to Omagh in 1990 to work as food and beverage manager in his family’s business – the Woodlander, then, after gaining a Masters in Hotel and International Tourism Management, James spent some time working in America.

He returned to Northern Ireland in 1996 when he started his career with Hastings Hotels at the Europa Hotel.

Four decades later James said that one of the consequences of the Covid furlough was a big influx of people out of the hospitality industry, whose outlook towards a work-life balance changed: “When we reopened we were so busy ... but where did all the staff go?

“I would say easily throughout the group we have recruited, since July, about 300 additional staff.”

James said that Hastings put an emphasis on training their staff to make a “meaningful difference”.

He commented: “Our heritage is amazing, our provenance is amazing – we are local, we buy local, we build local. Hasting are a family brand, a family company, we have to be authentic.

“Those three things are our core - heritage, provenance, authenticity.

“The real meaningful difference is what we, the people bring to you, our guests, not only in our offering but how we do it.

“If I can take everything to do with our team’s journey – from attracting, recruiting and training – and make them the meaningful difference, outside of a product, then I will succeed as the MD.”