Hotel group’s chief executive says the secret sauce for its success to date has been its people
. He’s referring to the Cork senior hurling team’s defeat the previous Sunday to Clare rather than a slew of empty rooms at the 53 hotels that comprise the Irish hospitality chain.
Crowley cites a mix of factors for the recent soft trading. “In the first quarter of this year, there were over 2,000 additional rooms versus the first quarter of last year,” he says, noting the opening of new properties and others that came back into the market, having previously been rented to the State.
Business activity might have softened, but Dalata continues to invest in growth. It has just spent €3 million on a brand refresh to bring some consistency to its three brands – Dalata , and the four-star Maldron and Clayton hotels. Dalata will also open four new hotels in Britain this year, in Brighton, Liverpool, London and Manchester, to bring the portfolio up to 57.
Crowley sees plenty of headroom for expansion. London, where it has four hotels, with another in Shoreditch to open later this year, could be a “very significant growth platform” for Dalata. In Manchester, it’s adding another 200 rooms at its airport hotel, with a new Maldron to open in the city centre, and, he adds, “we’d do another one”.
Dalata has also dipped its toes into the continental European market, taking over a former Hard Rock Hotel-branded property in Amsterdam last year and opening in Düsseldorf, dubbed the fashion capital of Germany. The Dalata effect is demonstrated by the fact the Amsterdam property has had “six or seven” nights of full occupancy this year. “Last year, they didn’t have one night full,” he says. “And that hotel is only with us six months.
“Continental Europe is the growth engine. For now, we’d like to be adding a hotel a year for the next couple of years and then a couple of hotels a year, and you go from there. In reality, the major growth is going to come from the provincial UK and London. In five years’ time, we’ll still be growing in London, but Europe is then where we’d be growing.”“The hotel business is reasonably simple.
We’ve increased our customer scores in terms of our food, while the quality and the consistency of our food has increased
Dermot-Crowley Clayton-Hotels Sean-Dunne
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