Hotel group boss confident multi-million investment in Harrogate district will pay off

Sean Donkin dropped out of university to run a pub, much to his father’s dismay.

Now chief executive of the Inn Collection Group, he has overseen the acquisition and renovation of three well known hotels in the district — the St George in Harrogate, the Dower House in Knaresborough and the Ripon Spa.  All recently re-opened as the Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon Inns after multi-million pound renovations.

We talked to Mr Donkin at the reopening of the Ripon Inn about his vision for the hotels and the group’s investment in the district.

The Ripon Inn

Why did the Inn Collection target this area for 3 new hotels?

When we first sought to come further into Yorkshire it was not about creating one singular site.  It’s about creating a nucleus so we can create our own culture on the site but also within the area.

So the manager here (the Ripon Inn) being alone wouldn’t be a great thing for him but having Harrogate and Knaresborough links them together really well.

We don’t want to set up sites in isolation.

The Ripon Inn is your biggest investment – was it a bigger restoration than expected?

When we first saw the property, we thought that’s one hell of a property, understanding that it’s gone through years of deterioration.

We’ve done 30 of these now so development wise it doesn’t really faze us but we do take a few knocks along the way.  In this case the roof, the walls, the windows, everything’s brand new. We’d anticipated about two-thirds of that to be case but when it’s closed for such a long period of time you only get one chance to do it properly so the budget was blown out of the water to give the building best chance it has taking a long term perspective.

Inside the Harrogate Inn

The three hotels have been landmarks. How did you approach renovation work?

People get very nostalgic about buildings which is lovely but we have to look forwards not backwards. You have to modernise them and treat them with respect as well.  At Ripon we lost the ballroom for an extra 10 bedrooms. The reality is without the extra bedrooms the building might not be viable at all.

There were people who were worried about what we going to do with Harrogate – I think the quality of the fit-out shows that we are there for the longer term.

By repurposing,  we are encouraging more people to do more things in the area they’re visiting. We do rooms, food and beverage. I’ve always been an advocate for being the best you can be within the boundaries of what you understand.

Have you struggled to recruit staff?

We haven’t had any issues, we honestly haven’t.  People have their own views about hospitality. But it gives people opportunities. You can learn and go other places – we’ve got sites in the Lake District, North Wales, Northumberland and there are genuine opportunities to further your career.

The Knaresborough Inn

Are you confident the group’s investment in the three hotels will pay off? 

We’ve proved it 27 times so far!  To do it individually I can’t see how that’s sustainable, but having a cluster is where you get the real benefits. You get knowledge of the local area and team knowledge. We want to incentive the team, so we do nights off all together. So how do you do this without shutting the place? We move staff between sites. All our processes are the same so we can do this.

I don’t know if people realise this but we started at Lindisfarne. The history between Lindisfarne, Durham, York and Ripon is huge. It’s following the path of, dare I say it, early Christianity. These are the tracks that people have trodden for hundreds of years and almost unknowingly we are following these tracks too.

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