We all know shopping while drunk can be a slippery slope, especially with Amazon at our fingertips. However, one British couple takes the cake when it comes to drunken purchases: an entire hotel.
Gina Lyons, 33, and Mark Lee, 35, were backpacking through Sri Lanka on their honeymoon in December 2017. They checked into a decaying and cheap beachfront hotel, and despite the overall appearance, quickly became friends with the employees.
Their first night at the hotel, they took a few bottles of rum to the beach and drank with one of the bartenders. The bartender mentioned the current lease of the hotel was almost up, and with the inspiration of twelve glasses of rum, the London-based couple decided to buy the hotel.
"After finding out that it was £10,000 a year, myself and Mark thought that it would be a brilliant idea to buy it - because we were so drunk," Lyons told the Mirror.
The next day, the couple went to speak with the owners about renewing the lease, but they had to bring translators as the owners couldn't speak English. Lyons and Lee were mostly left out of the business discussion due to the need for translators, so they decided to drink more rum while they waited and quickly became drunk again.
Lyons said, "After some bartering, we finally agreed that we would pay £30,000 for the three year lease and pay £15,000 in the first year and the other half by March 2019. But on top of that we had to pay about £7,000 legal fees in obtaining licenses and then £6,000 to refurbish, so it wasn't cheap."
Once sober, the couple still thought it was a good idea to move forward with the lease and paid the first half off in early 2018. Then in March this year, the couple discovered they were pregnant, and they soon found themselves in debt.
"I felt like I was already a bad mother because I felt guilty that I'd wasted all of this money buying a business that might not work.
"Even our friends and family think we're idiots and shouldn't have been doing it - we owed a lot of money from the wedding and only lived in a tiny flat, and now we had a baby on the way."
Lyons and Lee had a decision to make about the hotel, and they decided to go with their original drunken instinct, to put all of their effort, time, and money into the property. It turned out well for British couple and they officially bought the hotel in July and renamed it Lucky Beach Tangalle.
Now as the owners of the seven-room bed and breakfast, Lyons and Lee have been happily welcoming a steady flow of customers to their beachfront hotel. While shopping while drunk isn't a good idea for most, this British couple's story shows that it works out sometimes, and we can cheers to that.
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