New €30m hotel opens on Cork's Morrison's Quay with operators seeking second city location
The new Premier Inn hotel in Cork City Centre, has now opened.
Cork City is to get a second Premier Inn as part of an ongoing expansion of the UK’s largest hotel chain, which opened its first hotel in the city today.
Matt Ghent, development manager in Ireland for the Whitbread group, which owns the Premier Inn brand, said the company is actively looking at identifying a site for a second hotel in Cork City.
“We’ve grown Premier Inn significantly in the last 12 months in Ireland and we will keep working hard to expand our presence across the country as we respond to an undersupply of budget hotel rooms.
“Cork is marked for a second city centre hotel,” Mr Ghent said.
The opening of the group’s first hotel in Cork City is also its first hotel outside Dublin. The group now has a total bed complement in Ireland of over 1,000, with plans to expand to at least 3,500 beds nationwide.
The €30m three-star 187-bedroom hotel on the former Moore’s Hotel site on Morrison’s Quay is part of a wider €45m development that included the restoration and conversion to office buildings of numbers 11, 12 and 13 Morrison’s Quay, which formed the original Moore’s Hotel. All three own-door buildings are set to be either sold or leased.
Speaking at the hotel’s official opening, Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney said it was “a big addition to accommodation in the city”.
He said that there were “some other big projects that are going to move ahead locally too”, that would make the part of the city it is in even more attractive.
These included UCC’s plans for a business school capable of hosting 5,000 students on the opposite quay (Union Quay) and the long-awaited event centre at the nearby former Beamish site on South Main St.
“I have a lot of ambition about building a world-class event centre and it’s now pretty close to getting across the line, I hope, at last,” Mr Coveney said.
Also at the hotel launch was David Kelleher of real estate investment and development company Warren Private, the hotel’s landlord, which partnered with property development and asset management group Greenleaf on the project.
Mr Kelleher said Mark Elliot of Greenleaf “had the strange idea that there could be a hotel here some day” even though the group had no track record in Cork. He thanked estate agent Seán McCarthy of ERA Downey McCarthy for “getting them started”.
The main contractor on the project was the Co Cavan-based Elliot Group which also worked on one of Dublin’s Premier Inns.
Elliot Group managing director Darragh Elliott said 1,200 workers of various trades had been through the 0.65-acre Morrison’s Quay site over the lifetime of the project, which started in August 2021.
The hotel’s deputy general manager, Jan Folvarcny, said the hotel is fully booked this coming Saturday and is booked out for a number of upcoming events such as the Bruce Springsteen gig on May 16 in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and the Sting/Blondie concert in Musgrave Park on June 18.
Payment for a room is based on a dynamic pricing model similar to what Ryanair utilises and is dictated by demand, starting from €57 on a standard non-flex rate on the opening night and €66 for a flex rate.
