BELFAST BRIEFING:Bill Wolsey is confident that his Beannchor Group can trade out the downturn, writes FRANCESS McDONNELL

FIVE-STAR service comes with a price and, as at least one luxury golf resort can testify, not everyone is willing to pay for it these days.

The £30 million Lough Erne golf and hotel resort in Co Fermanagh set out in 2007 to woo high end visitors with a combination of “old world heritage and new world luxury”. Barely four years after it opened its doors, the resort is now in the hands of administrators.

What happened?

According to Northern Ireland’s newly reappointed tourism minister, Arlene Foster, the bank decided to call time on what she described as the “jewel in the tourism crown as far as Fermanagh is concerned”.

The bank in question is technically Bank of Scotland Ireland (BoSI) which ceased to exist last December. Its former € 32 billion loan book is now managed by Certus, an independent service company, which was set up by senior executives from BoSI.

Certus confirmed it appointed KPMG as administrators to Castle Hume Leisure Limited which owns Lough Erne.

Jim Treacy, the Fermanagh-born but Dublin-based businessman who built the resort, maintains he wants to find solutions to the problems at Lough Erne but time is probably not on his side.

Treacy is just one of a fast growing, but less than exclusive club of businessmen and property developers in the North who jumped into the hospitality industry only to have had their fingers burnt.

Adam Armstrong, Noel Murphy and William Rush of MAR Properties are good examples of developers who expanded into the hospitality sector with the blessing of banks including BoSI. At one stage, the group had a portfolio of 40 pubs and hotels across the North but it has been forced to offload a substantial slice of this, including some of the region’s top licensed premises.

This week one of the North’s top entrepreneurs is likely to confirm he has acquired 15 of those premises and also bought the historic Portaferry Hotel.

What makes Bill Wolsey, who owns the Beannchor group, different from other businessmen who fancied themselves as a pub or hotel owner is that he has 36 years of industry experience behind him. Beannchor is the North’s largest hospitality group. It operates 50 bars and two hotels including the five-star Merchant Hotel in the heart of Belfast.

Wosley, who bought his first pub in Bangor with the help of his parent’s life savings aged 22, knows what it is like to do business in a difficult environment – from a political and economical perspective.

He admits it is an interesting time to be adding 15 new establishments to his portfolio but he believes that if you “tailor” the premises to the market and give the customer what they are looking for – “good service, good value and good food” – there is profit to be made even when people are tightening the purse strings. Wolsey is optimistic about his group’s short-term outlook but he is also straight about the fact that if a pub or a hotel is not profitable it will likely face last orders, sooner rather than later.

He believes up to 20 per cent of Northern Ireland’s pubs could close within the next two years – with country pubs particularly vulnerable. The economic downturn is going to weed out “proper pubs from the pretenders”, he says. “We’ve had all these people here who know nothing about the industry running pubs, people who just jumped on the bandwagon and bought pubs when the going was good.

“They don’t have the skills and they don’t understand the business. The bottom line is they aren’t profitable and the downturn is going to weed them out.”

He says the Beannchor group has turned down about 20 requests from administrators to step in and run pubs and hotels in financial trouble. So far the group has acquired just one of these and is running another, the Leighinmohr House Hotel in Ballymena, for a bank.

Belfast-born Wolsey, who as a teenager had an unsuccessful apprenticeship at Arsenal football club, says the only way banks and hotels can trade through the downturn is to be at the top of their game. “You have to know what your customer wants; you have the right staff who will deliver good service all of the time and on top of this now more than ever you have to be in a position where you can deliver quality food at the right price. Pubs in particular need to have the right food offering, that’s what will bring people in through the door in the first place.

As he gets ready to launch his latest venue this week – the Portaferry Hotel – he says he is confident the Beannchor Group can trade out the downturn. The group employs about 550 people in the North but it is responsible overall for creating more than 2,000 jobs.

In general Wosley’s group tends not to manage its bars or hotels directly, with the exception of The Merchant. Instead it operates a system where it retains ownership of the premises but rents the business out to managers, many of which Wosley knows personally.

It is a strategy that has worked for him since he acquired his first pub. He is keen to pass on what he has learned both to his own family – his two sons work in the business – and to anyone who is keen to come into the hospitality industry.If anyone is going to help Northern Ireland raise a glass to the future, it might just be Bill Wolsey.