A HOTEL has raised a huge amount for charity after bosses vowed to give something back to the community.

The team at Holiday Inn Express Barrow has raised £200 from their coffee mornings for St Mary’s Hospice in their first quarterly count up.

The hotel launched its coffee mornings in October last year and has been running them continuously.

The club runs every day from 11am until 4pm. Everyone can come in and enjoy a cup of coffee with 20p from every drink sold donated to the self-funded hospice.

Robbie Gaffney, marketing manager of the hotel and leader of the Coffee Club campaign, said the coffee mornings had been really popular.

He said: “We started the coffee club after we opened but the pandemic hit so we couldn’t continue for a while so when we were thinking about relaunching it we decided we want to become a community hub.

“We are in the heart of Barrow and the town centre and we want people to know they can come in for a coffee, tea, or a bite to eat. We were always planning on relaunching but we have a strategy called ‘Giving Something Back’ introduced now.

“This year we want to give something back to Barrow, the local people, and charities and we have regular meetings to discuss how we can support the community further.”

The management team at Holiday Inn Express has started by partnering with St Mary’s Hospice to ‘give something back’ which goes further than just their coffee mornings.

Robbie said: “We put the discussion up to the team and got feedback from the general public and St Mary’s was mentioned quite frequently and for how hard they work and everything they do, it felt right that our first hotel charity was to be the hospice.

“We have regular meetings with how we can support them, It doesn’t just stop at the coffee club we have talked about utilising and supporting them with places to meet up and host meetings, they can use our hotel for that, we have meeting rooms and space in the restaurant and bar area, we want people to use the facilities we have for something good.

“We will be supporting them until the end of 2022 and it will get reviewed then for who will be next. We want to help as many charities and organisation local to Barrow as possible, but we are very happy to be supporting St Mary’s.”