BUSINESSES in Bright and its surrounding townships of the Alpine Shire are happy to be back in action after Victoria’s statewide lockdown last week.

Despite numerous establishments in the region reporting losses due to the forced closures, the town has stayed positive, and not even a week after everything was paused for five days, tourists have started flooding back into the area.

Hamish Nugent, co-owner of Reed & Co. Distillery in Bright, said that the lockdown was tough, but the irrepressible nature of Bright had kept both him and his staff positive.

“This most recent lockdown was definitely challenging,” he told the Alpine Observer.

“We weren’t sure whether it was going to be five days or longer, and it’s hard to plan around that.

“But we’re all open again now and very happy for it.”

Mr Nugent said that despite the lockdown only finishing a few days beforehand, this past weekend had witnessed a sizeable return of tourist-driven business back into the area.

“The weekend was good, I was actually really surprised with how busy it was,” he said.

“I thought it quite easily could’ve gone the other way, but it didn’t, so that was great to see.”

Gerard Gray, owner and sales manager at Dickens Real Estate in Bright, commented that although the lockdown and COVID-19 had forced events like the Autumn Festival and Brighter Days to be cancelled, which consequently had disrupted accommodation bookings, cancellations were quickly refilled.

“Obviously we’ve had the Autumn Festival and Brighter Days cancelled, so from a holiday rental perspective, we definitely saw some cancellations,” Mr Gray said.

“But those cancelled spots were filled almost instantly anyway, especially the bookings on the Labour Day long weekend.”

Mr Gray said that although the bricks and mortar operation of Dickens had to close over the snap lockdown, that didn’t stop the phones from ringing and email enquiries for properties from coming in.

“Plenty just happened over email, there was a spike in email enquiries, as was the case in the first and second lockdown last year, and to be honest, when things opened back up on Thursday we just hit the ground running and it feels like we didn’t miss a beat,” he said.