Start Of Whitby's 'Thank You Weekend' For NHS Frontline Workers

Today's the start of a 'thank you' weekend in Whitby for frontline NHS staff who are working directly with Covid-19.

Organisers say planning has been taking place since March this year.

One of those, Andy Brown, from Whitby Hospitality Group, said:

"The idea first came from my wife Polly. We were watching television at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic and saw all these NHS staff with their masks on, and all of this horrible bruising they had from wearing them for 15 hours a day and having to be away from their families.

"It just looked absolutely awful and she just said 'wouldn't it be great if we did something to thank them and suggested that we give them a free weekend'.

"We've got 400 people, and their guests, coming altogether and each of them are getting free accommodation, a free meal for two, a free drinks voucher for two, plus all sorts of other offers like free surfing, dog grooming, taxi rides and ghost walks.

"We ran a social media campaign back in sort of March and we set up a website and it was basically open for anybody on the NHS frontline to apply.

"We had 5,254 applications altogether and we randomly chose the 112 winners.

"147 businesses that have been hit really hard financially themselves have decided to offer this.

"I've calculated it and it comes to about £40,000 worth of accommodation, meals, drinks and other things.

"I think it's amazing that all these people are prepared to do that and it would be great if other towns could do something similar.

"We took the decision to not cancel the weekend mainly because it's not really an event.

"The people who are coming are just coming for a weekend just as anybody would; and if we decided to cancel it, most of the properties would have sold the rooms to paying guests anyway so you would've had broadly the same number of people doing the same things."

For more information visit: http://www.welcome2whitby.co.uk/whitby-thank-you-weekend.html

The organising team are Andy Brown - Highgate House, Garath Jackson - The Lansbury, Vanessa Gummer - Rosslyn House, Julie Pickard - The Ship and Phill Hesketh - The Belfry.