Deals and shuffles in the hotel industry as it prepares for a new year

The hotel industry is cautiously hopeful for the year ahead after it was decimated by the impact of Covid-19 restrictions over the past two years.

Laura Jones, Philip Gavin, Maciek Szczepaniec, and Cormac Pettitt outside the Clonmel Park Hotel, which has been acquired by the Pettitt Group.

Clonmel Park Hotel has been added to the Talbot Collection group’s portfolio after it was purchased in a private transaction.

The hotel, which will now be known as the Talbot Hotel Clonmel, currently employs 120 staff, and the new owners have confirmed that all existing jobs are safe.

The hotel will join the seven others in The Talbot Collection, owned by the family-run Pettitt Group. Other hotels in the group are sprinkled across Munster and Leinster in Cork, Carlow, Wexford, and Dublin.

"This is a major acquisition for us as a group,” said Pettitt Group managing director Cormac Pettitt.

We have grown our Talbot Collection Brand from our original property, the Talbot Hotel Wexford. We are delighted to extend this now to Tipperary, our fifth county, and to the thriving town of Clonmel."

This is the second recent sale by the Clonmel Park Hotel’s owners Tetrarch Capital, which bought the four-star Tipperary hotel in 2015. Investment firm Tetrarch also sold the Killashee Hotel in Co Kildare for €25m.

The sale comes as the hotel industry gets cautiously hopeful for the year ahead after it was decimated by the impact of Covid-19 restrictions over the past two years.

“The tourism and hospitality industry, including hotels, have a challenging few months ahead with a lot of uncertainty,” said Irish Hotels Federation chief executive Tim Fenn.

However, as a sector, we are optimistic for later in the year, though a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels of business is still some way off."

The Irish Tourism Industry Confederation (ITIC) has estimated that Covid-19 has cost tourism and hospitality businesses as much as €12.2bn.

The ITIC believes that restrictions, and the Government’s call to reduce socialising, has cost businesses €400m alone in December 2021 as hotels, restaurants, and bars faced widespread cancellations and no-shows.

There have been interesting moves in the hotel industry elsewhere in the country.

Hastings Hotels, has announced that its longest-serving director, Edward Carson, has retired as chairman and is succeeded by Howard Hastings.

Hastings, the son of William Hastings, who founded the hotel group, was the managing director of the business before taking over from Carson. James McGinn, who has worked for the Northern Ireland hotel group for 25 years as operations director and general manager of the Europa Hotel, has been appointed as the new managing director.