Having spent many a great weekend down Afan Way and either stayed at Afan Lodge or enjoyed a great evening there in the restaurant over the years it was sad to see the news below. Afan Lodge targets Mountain Bikers with excellent MTB facilities, superbly located at the foot of the trails. Nostalgia aside it's hard to view events like this without thinking about the overall demise of free-to-ride mountain biking in Wales.
Like this?
It's been a few years since I visited Afan but even then it was beginning to feel a bit run down across the visitors centre and trails.
We now know that Natural Resources Wales (NRW's) plans to slash their recreation budgets, meaning there will be no budget or staff to maintain any of its 550km worth of mountain bike trails, spread across all of its trail centres so this will get worse.
Afan should be a major MTB tourist destination given its legacy investment, infrastructure, free-to-ride large trail network, no end of wild off-piste trails to ride, access from the M4, and beautiful surroundings. Its potential ability to drive a tourism economy from MTB has continued to be squandered. A terrible wasted opportunity.
The announcement:
We are deeply saddened to announce that we are beginning a 30-day consultation period with staff, regarding the potential closure of Afan Lodge on Monday 4th November.
All bookings throughout this time will be honoured, and we are still taking bookings throughout October.
All bookings after the proposed closure date of Monday 4th November will be contacted in due course.
For more information, please send us a message.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated staff, and you, our customers for all your support over the years.
We hope we’ll see you at the Lodge over the coming weeks, where we continue to be open with a warm welcome on offer.
Let's hope the search for a new buyer is successful & they can make it into a viable long-term business.
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