As a long-standing Calor customer, and with more than 30 hotels located across the UK, we’ve been delighted to support them throughout the past few months and into the future.
As more people across the UK choose a staycation holiday this year, Macdonald Hotels remains committed to providing a luxurious and safe retreat for its guests, taking the upmost care to ensure guests are able to enjoy its facilities while also exceeding stringent safety guidelines. For example, they are moving away from a buffet-style breakfast to one that guests can enjoy in their rooms as one of the ways to enable social distancing. As many eateries have reduced their covers, more and more guests are choosing to dine in the hotels’ restaurants. To accommodate this change in dining demand, the hotels have reconfigured indoor areas and expanded outdoor dining, so that guests can fine dine safely – even al fresco when the weather permits. In England where they have been able to reopen spa and gym facilities, the number of guests using these at any one time is limited so that users can exercise or relax and unwind whilst maintaining safe distances from each other. To further implement social distancing, rooms are only cleaned upon request rather than every day and are sealed after the cleaners finish so that guests can feel reassured that no other members of staff have entered their rooms thereafter.
Calor’s flexible support
These changes to the hotel’s normal operational patterns have of course presented some challenges when it comes to ensuring the business has the fuel supply it needs to help it meet changes in demand.
Normally, automatic top up with Auto-ordering is used to monitor the usage of LPG across the majority of Macdonald Hotel’s sites, so that deliveries can be automatically planned. During lockdown, when there was very little usage, the company decided to dispense with this auto top-up method. Instead, they wanted to monitor and order gas as and when they needed.
This is usually straightforward. However, as there was no one on site in most cases due to lockdown, monitoring the tanks would prove difficult. A small amount of gas was still needed to cater for key workers who were using the hotels as a base away from home, staff who were still working at the sites, and to keep plant such as boilers ticking over.
So, to provide sufficient amounts of gas for these purposes without needing to manually monitor usage or pay for excess gas which wasn’t required, Calor worked closely with the group’s Development and Property Director, Hugh Cooper. Every week, Jay Parry, Calor’s National Accounts Specialist, pulled together data from the telemetry system and discussed this usage information as well as plans for the individual sites with Hugh to work out how much LPG each hotel needed from one week to the next.
Supporting Macdonald Hotels into the future
As each hotel in the group reopened its doors, Calor continued to work with them in this way to move from this manual assessment and re-ordering method back to the auto ordering process. As a result of Calor’s efforts and quality service, no sites ran out of gas, and the hotel company was able to manage their costs and cashflow more tightly.
Paul Downes, National Accounts Manager for Leisure at Calor said: “Looking ahead, it’s great to see all Macdonald Hotels re-open their doors for holiday goers to enjoy a luxurious break. Our support has meant we’ve been able to reinstate the automated telemetry systems at the majority of their sites. This means the hotel’s estates teams can now concentrate on other tasks as they look to get all hotels fully operational in line with government guidelines and welcome their guests during the summer holiday season.”
We’ve been delighted to work closely with Macdonald Hotels to ensure they have the vital LPG fuel they need when they need it. And we’re proud our support has also been recognised by the business with Hugh Cooper Development Director at Macdonald Hotels saying: “We would like to express our thanks to Calor for the excellent service over these last few months. The team at Calor has proactively worked with us to ensure we only received the deliveries we required, enabling us to control our costs while closed. Calor’s diligence during this period and its ongoing support is much appreciated.”
For more information on the support Calor provides to hospitality businesses, visit our
hospitality webpage.
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