A DEPUTY manager at a prominent hospitality business on Bodmin Moor has been celebrated after winning an award.

Alice Poole, a deputy manager at the Jamaica Inn, has been named Deputy Manager of the Year out of 34 venues within the Coaching Inn Group, which owns the venue.

Her career in the catering and hotels industry began when she was aged 14 waiting at table and helping-out in the kitchen at her mother and step father’s restaurant in Fowey.

Now she is not far away at Jamaica Inn and has just been named Deputy Manager of the Year by the Coaching Inn Group.

“I love my role helping to ensure the smooth running of such a busy operation at all times of the year,” said Alice, who joined the team shortly before it was taken over by the multi-award-winning group three summers ago.

Her career has travelled a long way before becoming a team member at Jamaica Inn because she had previously spent seven years working her way up through the hospitality ranks at an exclusive private members club for the film and media industry in Frome, Somerset, before going off travelling and spending a year running her own café with a yoga studio attached in Kampot, Cambodia.

Then after returning home to her native Cornwall, she spent a summer season cheffing for guests on The Provident, a converted Brixham trawler sailing along the south coast, around Devon and Cornwall and across to France and the Channel Islands.

Coaching Inn Group chief operating officer Adam Charity, speaking after the awards attended by over three hundred team member and guests in Lincoln, said Alice with all her years of varied hands-on experience was a most valued member of the team.

But she was not the only member of the Jamaica Inn team to be recognised for her contribution to the smooth running of the operation because Rob Gumbrell was named Group Maintenance Man of the Year as we reported previously in April.