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Hospitality in Scotland after lockdown and what’s different about The CiS Excellence Awards? – featuring: Alex Buchanan from CateringScotland.com – Recruiting in Hospitality podcast

After a year off due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the Catering in Scotland Excellence Awards returns in partnership with Caterer.com. We spoke to Alex Buchanan from CateringScotland.com about the awards and his feelings about reopening.

According to Alex Buchanan, Scotland is seen as its own self-contained market, arguably with different needs from the rest of the UK. “From a hospitality perspective, businesses in Scotland have found lockdown as tough as down south, maybe even tougher,” he said. “Operators here are finding things increasingly frustrating. A lot of time, money and resource has been spent on Covid-19 protection measures but with continued closures, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of help from the Scottish government.”

Despite all this, Alex is optimistic, “Because foreign travel won’t be coming back for a while, the demand for staycations and trips around Scotland is going to increase as lockdown lifts. People are going to want to get out of their homes and I think it’s going to be a very successful year for Scotland.”

Continuing to Celebrate Excellence in Scotland

Like many other annual events, the CiS Excellence Awards had to be postponed in 2020. “We could have gone ahead and had a virtual event, but we really didn’t want to do that,” Alex explained. “The very nature of the home working we’ve all come to know meant that everybody was spending all day online, and we just didn’t want to put them through all that for a ceremony. We consulted with our sponsors too and there wasn’t an appetite for taking it online.”

Alex is keeping tight-lipped about how the eventual awards ceremony transpire but promises it will be special.

What are the new categories for CiS Excellence Awards 2021?

CateringScotland has introduced three new categories for the current edition, the Collaboration Award, the Innovation Award and the Social & Community Award. “These new categories aim to acknowledge the incredible work many operators have been doing during this crisis to help others. They been helping themselves and their staff to keep busy, they’ve been helping their local communities and, in many cases, they been helping their own competitors by collaborating. They’ve had the attitude of, ‘if we don’t get through this together, then nobody is getting through it.’”