Viewpoint: Government is fuelling outrage over asylum seekers in hotels

‘Expensive hotels’ is a cheap dig. It's not the whole story, says Robin Sheppard

I suspect I’m not the only one in the hospitality industry who finds it jarring to hear the government and much of the media continually referring to ‘expensive hotels’ in reference to asylum seekers?

From the government’s own website we have: ‘More than 5,000 asylum seekers will be accommodated on vessels and in alternative sites to drive down the cost of expensive hotels’.

No wonder people feel enraged. The word ‘hotel’ conjures up images of hospitality, of welcoming staff, room service menus, a restaurant and a bar lounge perhaps. Maybe even a swimming pool and a sun terrace.

Of course the accommodation is no more a ‘hotel’, than a hand-basin is a spa. These are buildings that have been shorn of all hospitality. They may once have been functioning as hotels, but, with an irony that will have been lost on our humourless government, many of them are among the hotels that went out of business, or have become commercially unsustainable over the last few years in which the industry has been starved of thousands upon thousands of talented, dedicated, enthusiastic hospitality professionals by the ‘hostile environment’ of post-EU Britain. No wonder many companies have taken the relatively easy option of letting their properties to the government.

So the ‘expensive hotels’ narrative is unfair on everyone. Asylum seekers are not ordering up a pizza from room service. They are not sauntering down to the bar for a quiet drink. And perhaps the very word ‘hotel’ is being demeaned by being wilfully misused for blatantly political purposes.

If asylum seekers and refugees were actually exposed to the best of British hospitality, they would, for sure, be forming orderly queues. But the reality of this very deliberate semantic trick is to provoke resentment, divert attention, and to do one more disservice to our industry.

Robin Sheppard is the president of Bespoke Hotels