Restrictions may have been eased on regional Victoria from 11:59pm Thursday night, but it is not all good news for Ararat businesses.
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At Wednesday's press conference, Premier Daniel Andrews announced there will be no limits on travel and most venues and businesses, including hospitality, will be able to reopen with capacity limits.
Seated service hospitality venues are capped at 10 people indoors under the new restrictions and 20 people outdoors. Ararat RSL manager Maria Whitford believes "it's not viable at all".
"The Ararat RSL won't open for 10 people, although it will continue to provide takeaway and delivery," she said.
"It's not a good business model."
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Mrs Whitford said the Ararat RSL would open it's doors once again once restrictions eased to a one person to four square metre density.
"I think we can re-open once we get to one to four density, if we can get back to that it would be very beneficial for the RSL, we can then open and employ our staff appropriately," she said.
Despite not being able to offer in house seating, the RSL is still hard at work to provide for the community of Ararat.
"We haven't stopped, we pivoted the business to takeaway and delivery from March 2020, as soon as we went into lockdown," Mrs Whitford said.
"You can order online, it is available seven days a week and we will deliver to your house or you can pick up.
"We have an obligation in our small community to provide and we need to keep the staff engaged, that's the two reasons we run takeaway and delivery, she concluded."
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Normally at the this stage of the year the 14 rooms of the Barkly St motel would be packed with travellers due to the term three school holidays. However, for the second year running this will not be the case.
Ararat Motor Inn manager Michael Patel said running the Inn was "definitely a challenge with Melbourne in lockdown".
"Five million strong still cant travel, can't visit and can't visit their family," Mr Patel said.
"We will just keep dong what we have been doing for the past 18 months, navigating through the challenges."
Mr Patel was hopeful now travel was allowed around regional Victoria, the inn would receive more bookings and be able to stay afloat.
"We haven't seen a spike straight away, we did have a few people call up and make a booking when it was announced that regional is coming out of lockdown," he said.
"We are going to see some traffic so that's a positive but we just have to work through the challenges to try and stay afloat."
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