John Fitzpatrick: ‘The two hotels are running perfectly. Someone might make me an offer ... but I’m not in any hurry’

Irishman’s two hotels in New York City, the Manhattan and Grand Central, have bounced back from Covid to post record revenuesNew York-based Irish hotelier John Fitzpatrick: ‘There’s a perception that America doesn’t want people to travel. It’s not true.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times In the hotel trade, renovation is a constant state of being. No sooner have you finished upgrading a property than it’s nearly time to start thinking about the next refresh. Irish hotelier John Fitzpatrick knows the feeling only too well. He owns two stylish four-star properties in midtown New York – the Manhattan and Grand Central – having moved there at 29 years of age to expand the family business. At Grand Central, which has 155 bedrooms and suites, “we’ve been three years doing the bathrooms. We’re down to the last two floors,” he says, adding that each bathroom takes 12 weeks to completely refit. “I can’t just shut the whole hotel and renovate, I’ve got to renovate as I go along. I’m working now with a company on the interiors for the bedrooms, they all have to be done. They only take four weeks. I’m trying to make them a little bit more up date. It’s small things like putting two different types of USB ports beside the bed, to save people searching around for a socket and pulling things out. READ MORE“Manhattan [with 91 rooms and suites] was done about six years ago but by the time I’m finished with Grand Central I’ll be coming back to the Manhattan to start looking at touching it up.“I’m also going back now to look at the bar in Manhattan. We’re looking at moving it to the middle [of the room]. I want it to be casual but elegant. A hotel bar not a pub. But I won’t get to that until February or March.”The bill for refurbishing Grand Central will be north of $4.5 million (€4 million), he says. According to Fitzpatrick, New York City is “booming” right now in spite of all the cost-of-living pressures and geopolitical issues dominating the political debate in the United States, with midterm elections next month, and the fear that many tourists have of US border control searching their social media and stopping them from entering the country.Fitzpatrick argues that these fears are overblown, citing the Fifa World Cup during the summer when tens of thousands of overseas football fans visited New York.“People travelled and had a great time,” he tells me over a light lunch at his Irish home in Wicklow, adding that 65 million people will visit New York this year, back to the level it was at before the pandemic. “There’s a perception that America doesn’t want people to travel. It’s not true.” There is also a World Cup lament. “It brought us some business” but if Ireland had qualified ”we would have been out the door”.Last year, his two hotels posted record turnover of $28 million, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) of about $7 million. It’s occupancy rate is running at about 90 per cent and the average room rate is $350-$450, in excess of what it was achieving pre-Covid. There was also a big boost to New York from the Knicks, the city’s basketball team, winning the NBA title for the first time in more than half a century. The title win gripped the city.Fitzpatrick’s bars in Grand Central (located opposite the famed train station of the same name) took in $22,000 between 4pm and 9.30pm on the night the Knicks secured the title in the fourth of five finals matches, with local workers and tourists packing in to watch the action. “I was watching the numbers coming in [on an app] and it was unbelievable,” he says. “Knicks winning the NBA championship was really important. All of New York was behind it.” The annual UN week in September (when world leaders gather in the city) was “very busy” and “Christmas is just jammed”, he says. “I don’t know where the people are coming from but it’s great.”Fitzpatrick moved to New York when he was 29 to open a hotel for the family, which is best known for the Killiney Castle in south Dublin, now owned and operated by his sister Eithne’s sons Mark and Joseph Scott-Lennon – a third generation running a property that his parents Paddy and Eithne Fitzpatrick bought in 1971 and where John cut his teeth in hospitality. The business is in his blood.“All I have to do is walk into the lobby and I just know by the employees and by the customers if everything is running smoothly. I will spot something straight away.” Having sold a hotel in Chicago in 2006, John bought out his family about 20 years ago and wholly owns the New York hotels, including the freeholds on the properties. Business has not always run smoothly. The 9/11 terrorist attacks devastated the city’s hospitality trade while the Covid pandemic forced him to lay off staff and temporarily close one of the hotels due to lockdown restrictions. An upside of the pandemic (if there was one) is fewer hotel bedrooms in his neighbourhood. In the area between his two properties on Lexington Avenue there are now 2,500 fewer hotel bedrooms than before the pandemic. “Some of them changed into student accommodation. And then the Waldorf shut for renovation around the same time. They had more than a thousand rooms and they’re now down to 375.” “Business is great now in the sense of where we came from in Covid, when we had little or no help from government at all. I paid real estate tax every six months for a hotel that was closed – $1.6 million between the two of them.”Aside from running the hotels, Fitzpatrick has various investments and is a busy philanthropist. In 1994, he set up a memorial fund (hosting a golf event recently in Druids Glen) in the names of his parents that has raised more than $5 million for good causes, and has been a big supporter of the Ireland Funds (of which he is a former chairman) over many decades, supporting projects on both sides of the Border. Many who know Fitzpatrick consider him to be a workaholic. “People say that but I don’t know. Maybe I am. I’ve sacrificed certain things in my life to keep things going. But at the end of the day, I’m happy and I love what I do,” he says.Now 65, is he considering retirement? “Some people are happy to retire. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to slow down, no doubt. Over the last few years I’ve got a really good team around me. I delegate a bit better now. I’m still on the phone every day but I trust the team around me. “Do I want to work until I’m 80? Absolutely not. Do I want to slow down? Yes. But I do have to get out some time. “My father worked until he was 72, which wasn’t late, and then died at 75. You think, ‘What’s the point of all this?’ I want to enjoy life as well but I enjoy what I do. I’m not going to work until the end of my time but at the moment I’m happy.”He namechecks some of the senior Irish staff who have worked with him for years: group general manager Shane Cookman; Chris O’Sullivan, GM of the Manhattan property; Patrick Leyden, GM at the Grand Central; and his finance chief Peter Kidd. “As long as I have a strong team with me I’m happy. The two hotels are running perfectly, they are within 10 blocks of each other and I can walk between them.“I have two beautiful properties in midtown Manhattan, and they’re building all around me. Eventually, someone might come in and make me an offer, maybe not for a hotel but for something else. But I’m not in any hurry. I’ve a another good eight to 10 years. I can guarantee that I’m not going to get into my 80s and still be at it.”IN THIS SECTION