Mr. Paul Gallagher:

There is a perception that Irish hotels, and particularly Dublin hotels, got very expensive this year. There is no doubt that there was some sensational pricing. You could find hotel prices that would worry people immensely. I have the CSO data for October, which have just been released. Hotel prices have risen by 19%. However, hotel prices have actually only risen by 17.5% since 2019. If you take 2020 and 2021, the price of hotel rooms in Ireland collapsed because we had no overseas visitors. Hoteliers around the country were trying to attract visitors from the domestic market. To do that and to give people confidence to stay in Irish hotels, prices fell. That was seen across those two summers. The prices are now 17% higher than in 2019. The Deputy asked about Edinburgh in particular. In Edinburgh in August this year, an occupancy rate of 86% was achieved at €242. In 2019, that price was €199. The equivalent price in Dublin in August was €182.

In 2019, that price was €150 at 89.5% occupancy. The other anomaly between 2019 and 2022 is that the higher VAT rate was in place in 2019. Hotels could not pass it on because it came in very quickly to us and we had already transacted a lot of business. In fact we were charging the wrong rate of VAT in many cases and had to absorb that increase of 4.5%. I hope that addresses the Deputy's question.