Soaring energy prices hit South Australian hotels
South Australia’s soaring energy prices are putting pressure on regional hotels and clubs.
And industry players are saying it’s resulting in several venues closing down.
General manager of the Hotels Associations Australia SA branch, Ian Horne, said hotels right across the state had been hit by rising prices
"It's the biggest single debilitating impact on the industry in the last two and a half years," Horne told the ABC.
"We've seen power costs increase not 10 per cent or 20 per cent but 100-plus per cent in a couple of years."
But he said hotels in country areas were the ones under pressure.
“The bread and butter for your average regional hotel is the local community," he told the ABC.
"They don't seem to be able to grow their businesses because population growth is stagnant.
"At the end of the day it squeezes the capacity of the business to keep being able to pay its bills."
Certainly the cost of energy is forcing some places to close down.
One was the Kincraig Hotel at Naracoorte, in south-east South Australia, which has now been put in the hands of administrators.
Director Peter Symonds said energy costs were behind the decision. He said his power bill is set to increase by 123 per cent next year.
“We used agents to hunt down new power contracts for us and that was the best result they could come up with," Symonds told the ABC.
"We were going from about 7.5 cents a kilowatt hour to 17 cents. That's $500 or $600 extra a week you've got to find.
"I used to bloody dread opening the power bill."
In the end, he said, the pressure of mounting bills, combined with dropping business, meant the pub had to close.
"We worked our wages back — we more or less halved the wage bill from the previous publicans there," he told the ABC.
"It still wasn't enough.
"Other hotels were being walked away from as well in town, so we're just one in a list I think."
by Leon Gettler, December 1st 2017
