Howard Street site earmarked for new hotel
Planning permission is now being sought for another new 56-bedroom boutique hotel in the centre of Belfast, Licensed & Catering News can reveal.
The application has come from Peter Ringland, proprietor of the new Town Square development on the city’s Botanic Avenue. He says that he believes approval for the scheme is imminent and he hopes to be in a position to start work on the new hotel in January.
As yet, there is no name for the new venue.
The six-storey development is planned on the floors above Flame Restaurant in a building known as Howard House and speaking to LCN recently, Peter revealed that the format of the new development will feature larger hotel rooms kitted out with kitchenettes – an approach which, he says, is becoming increasingly popular in GB.
“This appeals to visitors who want to stay a little longer,” explained Peter. “It pushes the average stay up from one or two nights to perhaps, five and there is a lot of demand for that in Belfast at the moment with the increase in tourist business.”
Twenty-six-year-old Peter and his brother, Ben, are currently involved in an ongoing development at the former Crescent Townhouse site on Botanic Avenue, where they have created Town Square, a three-phase project that will eventually offer a licensed café, a new bar and a refurbished and extended hotel on the prime site (see pages 20 and 21 of this edition for full details on the scheme).
Peter has a background in serviced apartments and although he has now sold that element of his business on, he says that the new project in Howard Street will be “a hybrid version” of that model.
Should it be approved, his scheme will become one of around 30 hotel projects that are currently at various stages of development in Northern Ireland, the vast majority of them in the Belfast area.
It is expected that around another 1500 hotel rooms will be made available to visitors by 2018, bringing the number of rooms to 9,500.
Speaking during the recent Hospitality Exchange trade event at the Ramada Plaza hotel in Belfast, veteran hotelier, Bill Wolsey, expressed concern at the number of planned hotel projects in the province, saying that he felt the number of rooms under development was “insane”.
Peter Ringland, however, is confident that sufficient business will be there to support the planned levels of development:
“Demand seems very strong,” he told LCN. “And if we can get our corporation tax rate down then I do feel that demand is going to grow and grow. I have no concerns about this at all.”
