Hotel rates are now so bad that the Bord Gais is asking members of the public to let their performers stay in spare rooms

27 comments

1. That’s fucking mental. Maybe it’s common enough but I’ve never seen/heard of a venue asking

2. Wife: What’s that noise in the spare room?

   Me: Oh that’s just the cast of Jersey Boys, they’ll be gone in a month.

3. I’ll take in the lad that plays scar in the lion king I have a thing for baddies.

4. Jesus this is embarrassing…

5. How much are they paying?

6. Homeless families and refugees in hotels, tourists in residential Airbnbs, and now touring artists are gonna couch surf.

   This free market shit really is something

7. You’d go for a all expenses paid sun holiday for the cost a night in some of these places.

8. Theatre Digs is definitely not new. There are Facebook pages dedicated to people putting up places for these reasons as well as a website here too.

9. Dear Jesus.

10. >Play Your Part
    Host an International Touring Performer

    aren’t these the lads who cancelled Swan Lake? not too much solidarity there…

11. The blue man group has barricaded themselves in my box room.

12. “What do you do?”

    “Ah I work in the Bord Gais, pay is shite but I got to have Dame Vanessa Redgrave stay in the spare room last week so that was good craic”

13. That’s not a new phenomenon. When my family lived in Dublin we did it with a couple of theatres and art companies.
    Sometimes performers were here for 2-3 months doing rehearsals or on exchange programs with other companies from around the world. Putting them up in a hotel wouldn’t have worked.

    They were always lovely and had such busy schedules were barely there. I’m sure short term tours would normally utilise hotels and maybe now they are impacted, but if a tour is in town for more than 4 weeks it’s usual to seek hosts to take them in

14. So why are hotels so expensive?

    Is it the hotels grabbing all the cash they can and when you factor in the homeless and refugees being put up in the shittier hotels this causes a shortage of rooms at lower price points so the price per room rises even higher?

    That’s fucked up.

15. Second in the world in HDI, remember that everyone…

16. Funny that the theatre is owned by the Gallagher’s who also own the Westbury and the croke park hotel, why don’t they just let their performers stay there? Greed I suppose

17. Tour actors have always gotten a very small subsidy to book accommodation and they get kips the best of time. It’s nice to see Bord Gais is actually trying to help them

18. Is this unusual or a regular occurrence? Cos if it’s the former, I dismay even further.

19. This is nothing new here in Wexford during the Opera Festival in October/November. The visiting performers regularly stay with locals.

    Even one of my neighbours who spends half his time in the US makes his house available to the performers if he’s not here.

20. Hey, theatre worker here. This is nothing to do with hotel prices. It’s been common practice forever for performers to stay in digs, especially companies from the UK. They’re in the city for a few weeks, people do not want to live in hotels. They want to be able to cook for themselves and more importantly, they’re broke! Money is made by touring shows because let’s face it, theatre can’t compete with cinemas and are fighting for their audiences, so you can’t sit somewhere for more than a few weeks without drying up the audience pool, so you tour. And that means that everyone needs accommodation and if the company was paying for hotels, they could never break even. (Don’t forget, there is a whole crew to accommodate along with the performers) so – they get paid subsistence and find their own accommodation through a digs list most commonly provided by the venues.

    TLDR: This is common practice and nothing to do with current pricing.

    Edit: typo/grammar

21. I’m just imagining the audition scene from The Commitments. “Elvis was a Cajun, he had a Cajun heart…”

22. Paying in Pipe bands years ago we used to do the same thing when travelling, This is pretty normal.

23. After the pandemic, my sympathy for hoteliers has vanished. Greedy bastards, plain and simple. They way they scalp ordinary decent people who are just looking to get away for a while. They deserve to go under. Don’t give them your money ever again.

24. This isn’t new though? It’s been happening forever.

    I’m not saying the state of things isn’t a shitshow, but this isn’t a result of it.

25. GAIS is a Swedish soccer team. Göteborgs Atlet & Idrotts Sällskap, nickname The Mackerels.

26. I’ll take in the Chicago and Nutcracker female dancers

27. 760 rooms in City West now booked out for refugees seem a bit crazy when Dublin is a year round destination. Why not use some of the more seasonal places that don’t have year round need? There is a 21 hotel room stock in Dublin. Probably 1/3 are budget 1/3 mid range and 1/3 expensive say.

    City West alone could be 15-20% of budget hotel rooms.

    With them using City West for COVID and now this. I wonder who has the connection here.