“We’re at 100% through until the 31st [of December],” says Merrion Hotel general manager Peter MacCann as he explains the flow of business over the festive season. Packages for Christmas Day, starting at €1,200, were sold out “some time ago”, he says.
Overall, the Merrion has had a “really good year”, he says, in spite of still being subjected to pandemic-related restrictions in the first quarter of 2022. “The bounce back, post-Covid, took the whole industry by surprise. City centre hotels did better than the resort properties. A combination of that and the phenomenal demand out of North America to visit Ireland, born out of pent-up frustration to travel and [favourable] exchange rates.
It was Quinn and his business partner in Glen Dimplex, Martin Naughton, who had the original vision for the hotel, buying the four buildings from the State on Merrion Street for £3 million in 1991. Naughton agreed. “So I wrote to most of the major hotel chains globally, Hilton, Hyatt etc, and got a flat rejection from everybody. One day, Billy Hastings [of the Hastings hotel group in Northern Ireland] knocked on our door in Dublin and said: ‘I hear you’ve got a project and you’re looking for a partner’. It didn’t take him more than 10 minutes to see the prospects.”
“There’s that type of raw gouging that’s going on, but it’s not in the established properties, if I can call them that. It’s at a lower level in the industry.” The business went from 100 per cent occupancy to 2 per cent overnight. We lost two thirds of our workforce The hotel, he says, has been looking to hire a painter to work three days a week to keep the hotel looking smart but “we can’t find any, we just can’t find one”.
To aid its recruitment efforts, the Merrion is considering building accommodation for staff at a site it owns around the corner. “I was not academic. I wouldn’t be boasting about my Leaving Cert results and there was a sense of panic at home as to ‘what are we going to do with this idiot?’. My mum said one day: ‘I think Peter would be very good in hotels as he gets on with people.’ Prior to that, I had stayed in a hotel in Bettystown on a holiday, and that was my only exposure to hotels. She knew somebody, and I got a job as a trainee manager with Fitzpatrick Hotels in Killiney.
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