Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 15 June 2022
Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media
Rising Cost of Tourist Accommodation: Discussion
Mr. Tim Fenn:
If we were to have some kind of price control, and I am not suggesting that is the way it should be, and if all of a sudden somebody said that the maximum price in Dublin was the average price of €150 a night, then Dublin probably would have been sold out for June in the middle of May and there would be no rooms for anybody. We are trying to get to a stage where people understand the difference between what is happening in the market and what is being articulated around these last-available rates. We cannot add additional rooms in the short term. We have come through a very challenging time with the financial crash. As Mr. Kelly mentioned earlier, it was about 2017 or 2018 before anybody could actually build a room in Dublin because it was cheaper to buy distressed assets. We are now in a situation where, when we went into the Covid pandemic, there were perhaps 5,000, 6,000 or 7,000 rooms in the pipeline and they did not materialise, so we were down 3,000 rooms right at the start of this year. We are hoping that there might be another 5,000 rooms coming into the market by the end of 2024, and maybe more again as we go forward, but that is the real issue here. It is about the fact we do not have the availability. When some people also compare us-----
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