The owner of the Clayton and Maldron hotel chains is eyeballing cities in Spain, Portugal, Belgium and more in Germany as part of its next phase of growth in continental Europe.
Dalata Hotel Group has, in recent years, taken its first long-awaited steps onto the Continent; with openings in Germany and the Netherlands.
While near-term growth and expansion will still be in Ireland and the UK – the group’s two core markets – further growth in mainland Europe is very much on the medium-term agenda.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Dalata chief executive Dermot Crowley said: “We’re looking right around a variety of cities and ones that have a strong mix of corporate or leisure. So, if you look at Spain, we would go to Madrid, but we wouldn’t go to Marbella. If we were in Portugal, we’d go to Lisbon, but not to Faro. In Germany; Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin are all really attractive cities for us to operate in. In Belgium, Brussels makes sense for us.“
“Continental Europe is the growth engine,” Mr Crowley told The Irish Times business editor, Ciarán Hancock.
“For now, we’d like to be adding a hotel a year for the next couple of years and then a couple of hotels a year, and you go from there. In reality, the major growth [for the next five years] is going to come from the provincial UK and London. In five years’ time, we’ll still be growing in London, but Europe is then where we’d be growing,” he said in the interview.
