Hotel prices surge for Garth Brooks concerts as gigs selling fast on Thursday

Hotels and private lettings moved quickly to capitalise on fast-selling Garth Brooks concerts on Thursday, with limited availability and high prices across five counties.

Tickets for the country star’s Irish tour next summer were selling quickly on Thursday. Eleven dates are now slated instead of 10 – after a third night was added in Belfast due to demand.

Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Cork will also have the pleasure of the US country star in 2027.

Brooks will look to turn a significant profit on his Irish sojourn. So too will the Irish hospitality industry.

Several hotels and hotel chains responded quickly to the frenzy when the tour was announced just over a week ago – in some cases offering bespoke packages around the event.

As concert tickets were being secured by Brooks fans on Thursday, hotel and private accommodation bookings were quickly filling up on popular listings websites.

While the sites do not provide an exact picture of what is available on a particular date in the future – extra rooms may still be allocated by accommodation owners – they give a good sense of what is going on in the sector.

In Galway, where Brooks will play two nights in Pearse Stadium at the end of May, there was a dearth of options by 9.30am on Thursday morning – with visitors to the Booking.com site informed that up to 98 per cent of places to stay on those dates were unavailable.

That would pose a big problem for travelling fans. Unless, for example, they were willing to pay the €2,700 sought for the first night in a one bedroom, ground-floor apartment listed as 21km away from the gig.

On another website, one choice – described as a “stylish city centre hideaway & hot tub” – was quoted at €1,386 for a one-night stay for two guests.

The remaining hotel rooms did not hit the same heights as those apartments – but were still significantly more expensive than what would normally be expected.

About 18km from the concert venue, on the other side of Galway Bay, there was the option of a €820 one-night hotel room booking, while a hotel in Barna Village, about 6km from the stadium, was offering a one-night stay in a “luxury room” for €621.

In Kilkenny, it was bad news for prospective hotel guests by 10am on Thursday.

Booking.com was only able to point to one property available on the Friday night when Brooks is due in town – a cottage 24km away from Nowlan Park. Located in Bagnalstown, Co Carlow, it was priced at €200.

It was not, however, on the market for the following night’s performance.

For the Friday night in Limerick, 94 per cent of listings were unavailable by 10am – leaving just four for consideration. It was the same situation for rooms the following day.

The remaining listings were more reasonable than some of those seen in Galway. For example, a double room 8km from the Gaelic Grounds was offered at €353 for the night.

By 10:10am, rooms in Cork were filling up fast – with only 22 properties listed on Booking.com.

Among them, on the city’s South Mall, was a room for the Friday night at €408. That was typical of several others in and around the city centre, costing between €400 and €500.

Similar prices were quoted for the Saturday date.

A night in a “summer studio” apartment was available for €3,600.

In Belfast, the prices were not quite as astronomical as some of those seen in Galway – and rooms were seemingly more plentiful.

While 93 per cent of rooms available for the Friday night – when Brooks is to play at Boucher Roads Playing Fields – had been snapped up by 10:20am, 53 were still on the market.

One hotel in the city’s Titanic Quarter was offering rooms for between €300 and €350 on the first night.

Inevitably, some of the high prices quoted will lead to accusations of price gouging, with hotel owners and landlords being accused of taking advantage of high demand.

The Irish Hotels Federation (IHF) is adamant its members are doing nothing wrong – and some prices are just an example of the laws of supply and demand.

“There is no such thing as price gouging,” said its chief executive Paul Gallagher.

“What we have is dynamic pricing – and that works two ways. It goes the other direction in January. Hotels are charging 50 per cent in January of what they can achieve in July and August. I think people are well accustomed to dynamic pricing in all aspects of life.”

Overall, Gallagher maintains that more rooms are available around the country than a few years ago, and the impact of refugee housing contracts is “nearly over”. He said the average rate of hotel price inflation so far this year was just over 1 per cent, well below the overall rate.

The decision by Aiken Promotions to have Brooks play in venues outside of Dublin is to be welcomed, he added.

“It’s good for Irish tourism. It spreads tourism into the regions, which is what we wanted.”