COST OF TRAVEL:THE IRISH are still willing to pay more than any other Europeans for their hotel rooms, according to new research.
We have been spending an average of €122 per night for hotel accommodation this year – almost 15 per cent more than the Germans and over 17 per cent more than the Finns.
“The Irish tend to choose quite expensive destinations. We love Rome, New York, Paris,” said a spokeswoman for Hotels.com, which compiled the research for its price index.
“We had boom years where people liked to extend their travel portfolio and it became fashionable to travel. Because we were in a boom, we were perhaps also more generous and had more disposable income.”
We seem to have kept this attitude despite the recession, she said. The Irish retain the title of the biggest spenders on hotels abroad for the second year in a row, although we are spending less overall. The figure of €122, which applies to bookings between January and June this year, came down from the figure of €134 set between October and December last year.
Germans and Finns, who spent the least on hotel accommodation when they were abroad, paid an average of €107 and €104, respectively, per room per night
Prices for hotel accommodation worldwide fell by 17 per cent between June 2008 and June this year, according to Hotels.com. In the Republic hotel prices have dropped by 11 per cent; the drop in prices has been most drastic in Belfast, at 29 per cent.
The report also found that Irish tourists spent less on hotel accommodation at home, with an average spend of €94 per night. Norwegians, on the other hand, spent an average of €142 on hotel nights when holidaying in their own country.
In Lanzarote, a popular Irish holiday destination, a spokeswoman for VIK Hotel San Antonio said: “What we notice is that Irish tourists stay in the hotel a lot, whereas other customers would go out and see the country more, like, for example, Germans, who sometimes arrive here by car. That also means they spend more money in the hotel – and, of course, they are very sociable.”
The price index showed that the average price paid for a hotel room in Ireland by any nationality was €80 for the first six months of the year, compared with €108 in the same period in 2008.
In addition, cities regarded as very expensive for hotel accommodation, such as New York, Moscow and Dubai, became much more accessible, with drops in prices of between 20 and 40 per cent.