Dalata Hotel Group has reported results for the year ended 31 December 2018, showing profit before tax increased by 13% to £75.02m and revenue rose 11.8% to £338.3m.
Revenue per available room (RevPAR) increased 4.7% to £80.84m. Like-for-like RevPAR grew 8.8% in Dublin outperforming the market growth of 7.2%.
The company's hotels in regional Ireland and the UK (Clayton Hotel Birmingham pictured) also performed strongly with like for like RevPAR growth of 5.2% and 3.1%,respectively.
Over 1,150 new rooms were opened in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Galway and Newcastle, taking the pipeline to well over 2,190 rooms expected to be delivered between now and 2021.
Pat McCann, Dalata Group CEO, said, 'Trading across our three regions is in line with our expectations for the first quarter of 2019. We are confident in our outlook and we note the positive economic projections for Ireland and the increasingly strong tourist numbers/
'We are very happy with trading at the hotels opened in the second half of last year. We fully expect them to contribute positively to earnings in 2019.'
'We are very confident that we will meet our target of announcing 1,200 new rooms in 2019 through new build hotels, extensions of our existing hotels and opportunistic acquisitions which fit our strategic and operational criteria.'