You better watch out... this Christmas, Santa Claus is GOING to town
Bookings are at a rate not seen since the Celtic Tiger in f irst post-Covid party season
CHRISTMAS office parties will be back with a bang this year, with venues reporting the type of demand not seen since before the 2008 economic crash.
And it seems hotels and party venues are ‘making hay while the sun is shining’, with higher prices than ever being quoted for in-demand party venues and hotel rooms, according to the country’s largest organisers of Christmas packages.
Sales and marketing director Jimmy Bouchier, of Christmas Party Nights, told the Irish Mail on Sunday business is ‘absolutely chaotic’, and bookings started ‘unseasonably early’ in July.
‘It’s definitely the busiest I’ve seen it since 2005, 2006, 2007.
‘Sorry for the language, but a lot of people are saying to me, “F*** Covid.” They don’t care any more – they’re having a party.’
Mr Bouchier estimates that only around one in 20 people are even asking what would happen if Covid restrictions were reintroduced this winter.
He said: ‘The only issue and problem at the minute is trying to source venues – it’s extremely hard. And menus are really, really expensive.’
He said the average budget for his clients is ‘somewhere between €150 and €250 a head’.
Around €25 to €50 of that goes to Christmas Party Nights’s entertainment package, with the rest
spent on the hotel’s per-head price.
Mr Bouchier said ‘a lot’ of hotels now have a minimum spend of €25,000, including one in Dublin city centre he spoke to recently that will only cater for a minimum of 120 people.
‘That includes prosecco, a bottle of wine, the full fivecourse meal, and some drinks at the bar. A client wanted to book the event and 50 rooms and they were quoted €405 a room.
‘It’s crazy money, but the budgets are out there and people are spending that sort of money.’ The party planning veteran said that many people at Christmas dos will be meeting their colleagues for the first time, further adding to the appeal this year, including one recent booking where 58% of the company’s employees had been hired since the beginning of the pandemic.
Shared parties, popular in the 2010s after the recession, are being ‘priced out of the market’ he said, with most hotels and venues keen to snap up bigger groups of a few hundred people.
‘Most of these people [who attended shared parties] would be groups in hospitals, schools, public service, and they’d be paying themselves. So €50 to €70 would be the budget.
‘I was paying €30 for a meal in the
RDS [which hosts shared Christmas parties] in 2013, and now I’m getting quoted €85 a meal.’
He said there are still some hotels targeting the shared party market, charging groups of at least eight people around €75 per person for a meal, band and DJ.
‘It might be a case of making hay while the sun is shining this year,’ Mr Bouchier said of the high prices being charged elsewhere.
‘It wasn’t exactly booming in the early part of the 2010s, until
2015, 2016. It only started getting going and then we had Covid for two years.
Now there’s all this talk of crashes next year and all, so you never know – next Christmas could be a disaster and we’ll be back into the 2008 mould.’
A number of pubs and restaurants contacted by the MoS reported similar trends.
‘It’s crazy money, but the budgets are out there’
Brian Carthy, manager of Costigan’s in Cork city, said: ‘We’d have a few years of them coming to the pubs, and then you might have three or four years of them going big and going to a big hotel and really splashing out, which I think is looking like the way they’re doing it this year.’
He said enquiries he has received are for bigger groups than usual too – ‘averaging 30 or 40 people for Christmas parties’.
John Rockett, general manager of McSwiggan’s Restaurant and Café
Bar in Galway city, said: ‘It normally would start kicking off around September every year, but it’s a little bit earlier this year.
‘People want their Christmas menus now. They want to know what they’re booking and they want to tie it down.
‘So I’d say people are tying it down a lot earlier.’