Published on : Monday, February 24, 2020
Hotels and guesthouses in Ireland in 2019 had 73 per cent filled rooms with a slight increase on the 72 per cent occupancy rates that they experienced the year before as per the new statistics.
However, the Irish Hotels’ Federation (IHF) has cautioned that there’s a huge gap between hospitality businesses outside Dublin and the ones based inside the city. It observed that growth in the number of vacationers arriving here started getting hindering from 2019.
This week, while speaking in the annual conference of the federation in Galway, its chief executive, Tim Fenn, explained that the Republic kept on having a two-tier tourism, with regions experiencing the most horrible slowdown.
“Dublin continues to perform well with an average occupancy of 82 per cent, down 2 per cent, and this is on the back of an additional 1,300 rooms coming on stream during the year,” he said.
“However, the average occupancy for hotels in the midlands is 53 per cent, down 3 per cent, while hotels along the Wild Atlantic Way finished the year with an average occupancy level of 65 per cent.”
Mr. Fenn further added that these statistics were worrying in light of major disputes that the tourism businesses are already facing, and the vital role that it played in many regions.
He observed that tourism supported over 260,000 jobs, almost three-quarters of which were outside based outside the capital.
In 2019, it generated €9.2 billion in terms of revenue, around 4 per cent of the wealth produced in the State in last year.