VANESSA AND MATT DUNBABIN
When the business Andy Stuart was weeks away from taking over was engulfed with flames at the worst time of the year, you could have forgiven him for pulling the plug on his new venture. Instead, Stuart saw it as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up and now Cradle Mountain Wilderness Village Resort has reopened and is back better than ever. T he last thing Andy Stuart expected to hear when he was enjoying Christmas with his family on the East Coast last year was the devastating news a fire had ripped through the venue he had recently accepted the general manager position at. But when messages began flooding his phone – having been out of reception following a bushwalk in the Freycinet Mountains – the enormity of the situation quickly came to realisation. Late on Christmas night and into the early hours of Boxing Day, an accidental fire had ripped through the kitchen of Cradle Mountain Wilderness Village. Destruction from the blaze included the restaurant, function room, guest lounge, bar and kitchen in a total damage bill of around $750,000. Stuart was only weeks away from starting at the resort, situated in a picturesque and tourist hot spot, when suddenly those
plans were thrown out the window and he wasted little time in packing up from the East Coast to survey the damage first hand. “I was bushwalking with my family down the East Coast from the Freycinet mountains, we were off grid for a couple of days and when we came back down my phone was ding, ding, ding, ding, ding when I got back in range again,” Stuart says. “We were in the midst of change of management. I was coming in to take over the property in January and my predecessor was still there, but everyone had gone off at the end of the day, because they’d finished service for Christmas night. About 9pm all the staff had knocked off and left the mountain. I was probably three, four weeks before I was due to come up and start and I was getting all these calls saying, ‘so is this the hotel you’re going on to now’ and then the CEO was letting me know what had happened and was asking would I still be coming and all that sort of stuff. “I said ‘well, I’ll be coming but I’ll be coming today because I won’t be beating around the bush and waiting’. So, I rolled straight into it. I had run my own company for 20 years, sold that off to a multinational, and was then working for some accounting groups within Launceston, going out doing six-month jobs
29 Tasmanian Hospitality Review August/September Edition
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