Ebrington Hotel: Hopes new luxury hotel will be boost for Londonderry

The Ebrington Hotel opens to guests on Friday morning

A new hotel on the site of a former Army base will be a huge boost to the tourism offering in Londonderry, the head of Visit Derry has said.

The Ebrington Hotel will welcome its first guests on Friday morning.

The £15m hotel and spa will employ 85 people when it opens but will eventually have a staff of 120 people.

Visit Derry's Odhran Dunne said the hotel would help the city and district achieve its £100m target of overnight visitor spend by the year 2025.

"The hotel will help to accommodate the growing visitor numbers we have seen in the last number of years and also attract a new clientele," Mr Dunne told BBC News NI.

Mr Dunne said any hotel in the area that could help meet the huge demand for tourist accommodation in the north west should be welcomed.

A 140-seater restaurant will be open to guests and the public from Friday

"We have seen really strong growth in the international [tourism] market from the likes of north America," he told BBC News NI.

"There was a record occupancy in April and that is a great indicator for us."

The renovation work at the hotel site saw the refurbishment of the famous Ebrington clocktower and also five buildings at the former military base.

The story of the site so far

Ebrington Square is a former military base in Londonderry

Located on the site of a former naval base that opened in 1841, Ebrington was known as HMS Sea Eagle during World War Two, and was an important part of the North Atlantic Command.

The 29-acre site continued to operate as a military barracks until 2003.

Plans for a hotel at the site were first unveiled in 2017 and granted planning permission by Derry City and Strabane District Council the following year.

There had previously been concerns about the pace of the site's development.

In 2019 plans for a multi-million pound distillery and visitors centre at the site were scrapped while in 2018 it was also revealed work on a museum marking the city's maritime history had also stalled.

In January 2022, the then functioning Stormont Executive announced £15m worth of investment for the hotel.

On Friday the long-awaited Ebrington Hotel opened its door to guests.

The hotel currently has 93 rooms available on its opening day, but will have 152-room capacity when building work is finished, managing director Cecil Doherty told BBC's The North West Today.

Also on offer is a conference room, a 140-seater restaurant, bars, a number of lounges and a spa with a hydrotherapy pool.

The hotel has a spa room with a hydrotherapy pool

Mr Doherty said the hotel had been eight years in the making with many setbacks and hurdles, but they are very excited to finally open.

"Our phones haven't stopped," Mr Doherty said.

"We have internal guest targets that we are looking to meet and the indications at the moment is that we will exceed those."

The hotel will eventually have a capacity of 152 rooms

Mr Doherty said the hotel was hoping to tap in to the lucrative golfing market and also appeal to tourists making their way to various locations across the island of Ireland on tour busses.

"The north coast of Northern Ireland caters for £12m of the golfing market and very little of that market stays in the city here.

"We will also be focusing a lot on an international clientele who come to other areas of Northern Ireland and move about day-by-day."

'Night-time economy'

James Huey, who owns Walled City Brewery in Ebrington said the hotel's opening was "huge" for the former military site.

"I hesitate to say game-changer," he told BBC Radio Foyle's The North West Today programme.

"It has been used a lot about Ebrington Square but this does change everything. It gives a night-time economy to the square. It is very exciting for us and we are absolutely delighted.

Mr Huey said when he opened his business in 2015, it was "with the premise that the hotel was going in beside us".