Ramada in €300m Irish hotel venture

Ramada Hotels and an Irish company, Crawford Investments, are set to spend more than €300 million developing a 32-county chain of 37 hotels over the next three years, it was announced yesterday.

If it is successful, the development will make Ramada the biggest hotel chain in Ireland. Crawford chairman, Mr Michael Knox-Johnston, revealed details of the plan at launches in Belfast and Dublin yesterday.

The partners plan to locate seven of the hotels in Northern Ireland, which will account for an investment of more than €90 million. Of the total 37, 27 will be newly built while the remainder will be independent hotels that convert to the Ramada brand.

They have already signed up four hotels in Derry, Leitrim, Wicklow and Limerick, while building and pre-development work is under way at another five sites, including Fermanagh, Tipperary and Kilkenny.

Mr Knox-Johnston, who owns Crawford, told The Irish Times yesterday that it had heads of agreement drawn up for a further 10 sites, including one on the outskirts of Dublin. Crawford and Ramada intend to have at least one hotel in every county.

He said that it was actively seeking sites in Belfast and Dublin city centres, Cork, Antrim, Down, Galway, Kilkenny and Wexford.

Despite the fact that the partners intend to build the majority of hotels, Mr Knox-Johnston said he was not concerned about the prospect of encountering planning difficulties.

"We have spent a lot of time talking to planners," he said. "There is a general consensus that we need growth in this area."

The group will be targeting the golf market and intends developing golf courses along with a number of its properties. Major-winning professional golfer Mr Nick Faldo has designed a course that will be built along with a planned Ramada for Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. However, Mr Knox-Johnston stressed that it would be chasing the broad tourism market.

Crawford, which is based in Cork, owns the Ramada franchise for the island as a whole. Ramada is a multinational group owned by the US Marriott chain which operates 200 hotels in the US, Asia and Europe. Mr Knox Johnston has worked in the hotel business for 35 years. He is a former manager of Mount Juliet in Co Kilkenny and owned the Inchydoney Lodge and Spa in Co Cork.

Welcoming the announcement yesterday, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr O'Donoghue, said the continuing expansion of the hotel sector was necessary to achieve the targets set down in the report of the Tourism Policy Review Group.

"Those targets include a doubling of overseas visitor revenue to €6 billion a year and an increase in overseas visitor numbers from six million to 10 million a year by 2012," he said. He added that figures indicated that visitor numbers had increased this year.

He also said it was vital that the tourism sector did not ignore the warning signals about the country's declining competitiveness.