Premier Inn has opened its first property in Cork City Centre, its 14th in Ireland. The new hotel features 187 rooms, including double, twin, family, and accessible rooms, as well as a Thyme Bar and Grill.
It follows a €29m redevelopment of the old Moore’s Hotel building in Cork with a redesigned exterior with colourful paint and unique offset windows..
The hotel offers double, twin, family, and accessible rooms, and features the Thyme Bar and Grill restaurant.
The hotel is part of a wider €45m development that included the restoration and conversion to office buildings of numbers 11, 12 and 13 Morrison’s Quay, which formed the original Moore’s Hotel. All three own-door buildings are set to be sold or leased.
Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney said the hotel is “a big addition to accommodation in the city. There are some other big projects that are going to move ahead locally, UCC’s plans for a business school capable of hosting 5,000 students on the opposite quay (Union Quay) and the event centre at the nearby former Beamish site on South Main St. I have a lot of ambition about building a world-class event centre and it’s now pretty close to getting across the line, I hope, at last.”
With the addition of the Cork City Centre property, Premier Inn now has over 1,000 rooms in Ireland, in addition to five hotels in Dublin, three in Belfast and one each in Bangor, Carrickfergus, Coleraine, Derry and Lisburn. Future expansion plans for Premier Inn include additional hotels in Galway, Limerick, and Killarney.
Matt Ghent development manager in Ireland for the Whitbread group said the company is seeking a site for a second hotel in Cork City: “We have grown Premier Inn significantly in the last 12 months in Ireland and we will keep working hard to expand our presence across the country as we respond to an undersupply of budget hotel rooms.’
- Elsewhere in Cork a family-owned hotel group is currently developing The Moxy Hotel on Camden Quay. This three-star hotel is being built at the site of the former Mckenzies Circuit Courthouse, which was purchased by the JMK group for €3.5 million in 2020. The Moxy Hotel is set to open by the end of this year.
- Permission has been granted for a new hotel in the city centre, located near Patrick Street. This new boutique hotel will have 12 rooms and is expected to be completed and open next year.
- A new aparthotel with 103 bedrooms is nudner construction at 31 and 32 South Terrace. This aparthotel is anticipated to be completed and open by the following year.
