It would be nice to believe the Government knows what it is doing regarding summer holidays this year, both overseas and in Britain, but I suppose it's understandable that the confusion just gets more Alice in Wonderland by the day.
We had already seen a marked reluctance for customers to confirm bookings for this summer and now with the most recent advice we can expect this trend to continue. So we have been taking a long hard look at how we operate this summer and when. The crew are both in a vulnerable group and so we do not want to start greeting guests again until we are inoculated at least once, probably in April or May. Hopefully our more vulnerable guests will also be similarly protected. We plan to continue with our three day decontamination breaks between events and our deep clean and misting policies. We have extended our pre-event questionnaire to require a recent negative test or vaccination and limited bookings to household bubbles, support groups and self-created covid cautious groups.
We do not think travel and holidays will be realistic much before the start of June and we also think the majority of regattas and festivals will be cancelled again or postponed into the Autumn. The possibility of extended school terms and a shorter summer holiday will also effect booking periods and so we plan to concentrate our season on June, July and August, always the best weather and seaside time.
Over the last twelve months we have been able to keep going by working in our past professional field of architecture. We plan to continue this up until June when we will fit in charters between our professional commitments for the three summer months before returning to full time professional work for the autumn, winter and spring. That way we hope to keep our long term dream alive and our wonderful boat fully maintained and licenced.
To be able to juggle these commitments and keep the decontamination breaks we have decided to suspend our on-line booking system and ask that any prospective customers contact us through bookings@snark.limited with their preferred dates and numbers. We have simplified our charges to be all inclusive and split between a flat daily charter fee of £595 for the boat and crew plus a £95 per person per day tariff for accommodation, full board etc. Charters can be between 2 and 10 days for between 2 and 8 people. There is more on this on our updated web site, www.snark.limited.