According to a leading Internet hotel price comparison site rates in Dublin hotels went down by around 7% in 2010. The report by Hotels.com showed that in the rest of Ireland hotel prices fell by around 4% to levels not seen since 2004. The average accommodation rate in most hotels across Ireland dropped to €79 per night last year, although in some counties it is was as low as €59 per night.
These prices mean that hotels in Ireland now offer some of the most competitive accommodation rates in Europe and only in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary can even lower rates be found. As Dublin is the third most popular destination for tourists from the UK this is good news even for those UK guests looking for luxury hotels in Dublin where 4 star accommodation can easily be booked for an average rate of €114 per night and at times as little as €83. For this kind of money guests would only find 3 star hotels in London and 2 star hotels in Paris available to them. Hotels in Dublin now offer some of the most affordable accommodation among the major capitals of the world, whilst Kilkenny has become the most expensive destination in Ireland with hotel rates averaging €112.
Jounal.ie also reported this week that the Dublin based National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), totally refuted any suggestions that their control of 83 hotels had contributed in any way to the fall in the rates demanded by Irish hotels. There had been suggestions that the assets under the control of NAMA had helped make the hotel market in Dublin and the rest of the country very competitive with private hoteliers having to cut prices in order to attract guests. The Chairman of NAMA, Frank Daly, this week speaking at the AGM of the Licensed Vintners Association in Dublin, said that there was excess capacity in the Irish hotel market and that NAMA had not been exerting any influence on the market. Mr Daly said that hotels controlled by NAMA accounted for less than 10 percent of the total number of hotels in Ireland and that there were other non-Irish institutions that could exert more influence as they controlled around 300 hotels between them. According to Mr Daly there were thirty NAMA hotels in Dublin and that predatory pricing practices were driven by non-NAMA hotels. “NAMA owns the hotels loans, but has no ambition to become directly involved in the management of the hotel businesses concerned, longer than is necessary or indeed to hold these assets longer than necessary,” Mr Daly said.
Paul Gallagher, the president of the Irish Hotels Federation, was reported by RTE to have also recognised that NAMA was not responsible for the fall in prices and he indicated that the main factor that was contributing to the drop was the fact that there was an oversupply of rooms in Dublin and Ireland in general. Mr Gallagher said that 22,000 extra rooms were built in the country between 2005 and 2008. Current occupancy rates were said by Mr Gallagher to be around 50 percent, but this figure needed to be closer to 60 percent in order for the market to become sustainable.