We provide for our guests’ mental health by providing an escape from stress and a relaxing atmosphere. Our friendly and professional employees deliver on our promise of providing tip-top, loving and clean – TLC – accommodation that ensures our business and leisure guests have what they need for a comfortable, pleasant and relaxing stay in a home-away-from-home environment.

We provide for guests’ physical health by offering a range of nutritious and delicious meals in our restaurants, in-room tea and coffee making facilities, free magnesium-enriched filtered water in hydration stations, comfortable beds and fresh linen for a good night’s sleep, fitness centres in our Courtyard Hotels and City Lodge Hotels so that guests can keep up with their exercise routines, swimming pools in most of our hotels, and friendly and helpful staff keen to ensure guests have a great stay.

We ensure the wellness of our environmental surroundings with 25 of our hotels running on solar power, and more hotels scheduled to receive solar installations in the year ahead. The solar installations are instrumental in offsetting high energy costs, especially due to the increased prevalence of load-shedding and high fuel costs, and reducing our dependency on traditional energy sources.

Several hotels, most recently Road Lodge Southgate and City Lodge Hotel and Town Lodge Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha), have had boreholes and filtration plants installed. Our recently developed Courtyard Hotel Waterfall City, opened in March 2021, receives water from artificially intelligent water pumps that monitor usage and ensure that the hotel receives the water that it needs in a sustainable manner.

We provide for the wellness of the communities around us with our corporate social investment (CSI) initiatives throughout the year. The group supports various large national charities and each hotel has independence to pursue its own charitable initiatives with smaller local organisations and we encourage our hotel teams to pursue their own charitable initiative with local communities.

Our employment initiatives also contribute to societal transformation. Our commitment to developing and providing opportunities to the communities in which we operate has been demonstrated through our participation in youth development projects e.g. YES programme and Trees for Africa.

Strong governance and corporate wellbeing are points of pride for the group as we have a dynamic board of directors and executive team with a wide variety of skills that contribute to robust discussion and innovative ideas. During the pandemic, management and staff demonstrated their agility in responding to the crisis, finding new ways of operating and taking care of each hotel and its team. The group has the support of a strong and supportive shareholder base and a motivated and energetic employee cohort which both contribute to decision-making and rapid changes for successful implementation.

Financial wellbeing has been on every individual’s and business’s minds since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and CLHG is no exception. We implemented robust cost containment policies during the year under review to ensure continued sustainability.

The disposal of the east African operations and the subsequent application of the proceeds toward paying off a substantial portion of our interest-bearing borrowings, as well as the upward trend in occupancy and room rate recovery in the latter half of 2022, have allowed the group to return to a state of financial wellbeing. The year ahead will see both improved liquidity, and operational performance and prudent money management in order to strengthen that position.