ITTN’s Katie and Laurie joined key travel trade and press in Café en Seine yesterday evening for a cocktail and Hors d’oeuvres event with the John Fitzpatrick Hotel Group.
In attendance, John Fitzpatrick thanked trade and press for their continued support to the hotel group which spans three boutique hotels: two hotels in New York City and a castle hotel in Dublin – still run by the Fitzpatrick family who have been in the hotel business for over 40 years. The next generation of Fitzpatricks’ now run the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney while John’s right hand-man Shane has worked with him for thirty years. John also applauded Suzie – his reservations lead – who has been keeping everything running behind the scenes for the past eighteen years.
“New York is 100% back,” Fitzpatrick told attendees, “anyone who has been there in the last year will have seen it – that it’s just spectacular.”
John Fitzpatrick recalled how the travel trade has been supporting the Fitzpatrick Hotel group since the early days. Having come from a hotelier background with his parents the late Paddy and Eithne Fitzpatrick, who acquired the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel – a building dating back to 1740 – in 1971; the Fitzpatrick Hotel opened its doors in 1991 as the very first Irish hotel in New York.
John made no bones about the difficulty of this endeavour, and the many hurdles he had to overcome to get the business off the ground in Manhattan. Speaking to this, he recalled a fam trip organised with Aer Lingus in the early days of the hotel launch. He didn’t mind hosting the fam, he told the crowd, and the free rooms that the hotel could barely afford at the time, knowing the agents on the fam would go back to Ireland to sell the hotel to Irish travellers. It was snowing that weekend, and the agents ice-skated in Rockefeller Centre, and had a wonderful couple of days. Maureen Delmar of MD Travel Donabate, who attended the event last night, remembers the trip fondly.
At the end of the fam, as the agents headed to the airport, and in a bid to save money on a Sunday night, they decided not to hire in housekeeping. Shane Cookman, Area General Manager of the Fitzpatrick Hotel Group in the States, also in attendance, decided to “warehouse” the rooms overnight so as not to bring in the housekeepers on double-time and there were no guests booked in. But by the time the agents arrived at the airport, the snow was falling thick and Aer Lingus rang the hotel shortly after to tell reception that the agents were heading back: the flight had been cancelled due to weather conditions and they needed a place to stay as the storm blew over.
There a scramble with the General Manager at the time as management wondered what they were going to do without housekeeping. John made the decision to put everyone back in the same rooms they had been staying in and they banded together – without time to change the sheets – to at least make the beds and put fresh towels in!
“The most beautiful thing about it was that I was getting paid that night,” Fitzpatrick finished, “because Aer Lingus were paying for it!”
Fast forward to February 2026, the Fitzpatrick Group is in the process of finishing a two-year major renovation on their second Manhattan Hotel in Grand Central. Bedrooms will be ready for sampling by the end of this year as they finish up renovations in the bar and restaurant. John Fitzpatrick says he prides himself on the personal service, knowing that’s what keeps people coming back to the Irish hotel chain, which notably remains the only Irish-operated and owned hotel in New York city.
