Jennifer O’Connell: Crazy hotel prices are not just the result of Taylor Swift economics

Taylor Swift gets blamed for a lot of things, but it hardly seems fair to pin the runaway greed of Dublin hoteliers on her.

During Leaders’ Questions last Wednesday, Donegal TD Thomas Pringle told the Dáil the cheapest hotel rate he could find for the dates of the musician’s concerts in June next year was €350 a night. One enterprising – he didn’t use that word – landlord was offering a two-bedroom apartment for €20,000 for the weekend of the gigs, he said.

Any frequent visitor to Dublin could have told him that it doesn’t require the prospect of legions of Swifties – or GAA or rugby supporters, or Dermot Kennedy fans – coming to town to raise the capital’s hotel prices to the realms of the utterly fantastical. That’s where they seem to have been hovering in a semi-permanent state of suspension for some time now.

I tried to book a hotel room in Dublin with a few days’ notice recently. It was a Thursday night at the beginning of June, and I was braced for the pickings to be slim. This optimism was misplaced; the pickings were positively skeletal. A large king room in one of the city’s nicest five-star hotels was going for €1,299 per night on the Friday night. Accommodation on the quays could be found for a much more affordable €109 – as long you didn’t mind sharing a room in a 32-bed mixed dorm. Then there was the room described by its owner as “a suite” and a “king room with lake view” with capacity to sleep 10.

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The accommodation might have been described as charmingly utilitarian, if your point of reference was the three-bed house you shared with 36 other people on your J1 visa in Nantucket: it featured two single beds end-to-end and two sets of single bunks. There was no lake in evidence, just a vista of a grubby wall – but then there aren’t too many lakes within a brisk walk of Connolly station. At full price, it was advertised at €870 per night for 10 people, or €370 for one person travelling alone, though you could get significant discounts depending on when you book. At those prices, you might expect breakfast would be included – along with parking, dinner, champagne, a week in Marbella and possibly a free puppy. Your €370 didn’t even get you your own bathroom.

The mythical sweet spot where you’ll get a reasonable deal is frustratingly elusive. Try to book a modest room now for a random night in September, and you’ll pay north of €250

Still, it was actually one of the cheaper offerings out there – especially if you brought nine friends – which may be why, when I checked again this week, it seems to be fairly heavily booked throughout the summer. The point being that crazy Dublin hotel prices have nothing to do with Taylor Swift economics, the phenomenon whereby a megastar announces a tour and instantly unleashes an epidemic of price gouging. Fáilte Ireland recently pointed out that regular hotel price spikes – which are tied to concerts, sporting events, or any day with a “y” in it – were damaging the industry’s reputation “both nationally and internationally”.

The extension of the lower 9 per cent VAT rate for hospitality – which was introduced in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis – to the end of August was a missed opportunity to encourage hoteliers to think of the bigger picture, and stop ripping their customers off.

Yet Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the Dáil this week that when he had spoken to hoteliers recently about claims they were price gouging, “their story is to tell us that the coverage in the media has been unfair and that if you try to book a hotel more than a year ahead, it’s the rack rate you get”. So there you have it. High hotel prices are either all media hype or all punters’ own fault. Meanwhile, the mythical sweet spot where you’ll get a reasonable deal is frustratingly elusive. Try to book a modest room now for a random night in September, and you’ll pay north of €250.

Pressed on the question of crazy hotel prices at Leaders’ Questions, Varadkar – bafflingly – seemed to suggest that the public would have to choose between housing and hotels. “We do not have enough hotels in the city of Dublin, but we do not particularly want a huge number of new hotels to be built, because one of the biggest challenges we are facing is the housing crisis. And rather than more hotels and Airbnb properties, we want fewer new hotels being built, fewer Airbnb properties, more construction going into housing.”

People are dancing into the night – and then weeping into their credit card statements when they get landed with their accommodation bill

Why does it have to be a binary choice? Couldn’t we imagine a city where, with proper planning, we could have enough of both – hotels and housing? The problem in Dublin isn’t a lack of space, if the figures for unpaid levies on vacant and derelict sites are any indication.

The capital needs more hotel rooms, particularly now with about one-third of hotel beds nationally contracted to the State. But what it might need even more desperately is some kind of long-term vision.

In a classic example of short-term thinking, Dublin city councillors voted three years ago to limit hotel development in the city. The decision seemed to have been influenced in part by a successful grassroots campaign group, No More Hotels, which saw the city’s future as a play-off between culture and tourism. “Too many cultural hubs in Dublin have been bulldozed to make way for just-for-profit hotels,” the group said in a statement. “We want to re-live the glory days when you were fizzin’ to get your glam on and dance into the night.”

Now, several years on, the music is back. Gigs and concerts are happening again. People are dancing into the night – and then weeping into their credit card statements when they get landed with their accommodation bill.