Pick the evening, then pick the hotel
Belfast's centre is about twenty minutes across on foot, so nowhere is far. What differs is what happens when you walk out the door at seven. The Cathedral Quarter puts you in bars and restaurants immediately. The Titanic Quarter is quiet, handsome and slightly empty at night. Holywood, ten minutes out on the Lough, is countryside with a city view.
We book all three for different trips, and we have got it wrong often enough to be specific about it.
The five we would actually book
These are the beds we put visiting family in. Prices in Belfast remain well below Dublin for equivalent quality, which is one of the quieter arguments for coming north.
- The Merchant Hotel
- Cathedral Quarter. A Victorian bank with the most theatrical dining room in Ireland. Best for a first Belfast trip.
- Culloden Estate & Spa
- Holywood, ten minutes out. Gothic mansion, twelve acres, a real spa. Best for families and slow trips.
- Grand Central
- City centre. Efficient, modern, and the 23rd floor Observatory bar is the city's best view.
- Titanic Hotel Belfast
- Titanic Quarter, in the original Harland and Wolff drawing offices. Best if the ship is why you came.
- The Fitzwilliam
- Great Victoria Street. Five star for four star money, opposite the Grand Opera House.
Or stay outside the city
Two hotels outside Belfast do a specific job. Galgorm, thirty minutes north at Ballymena, is a riverside thermal spa village that puts you halfway to the Causeway. Sitting in an outdoor hot tub in Antrim rain is a better Northern Irish experience than most things you can pay for indoors.
Ballygally Castle sits on the water at the start of the Antrim Coast Road, and it is the right first night if you are driving north the next morning. Bushmills Inn, two miles from the Causeway, is the other one, and it is the single change that turns a Causeway day trip into a Causeway trip.
Practical notes
Belfast prices spike around big concerts at the SSE Arena and international rugby weekends, and drop sharply midweek. Sunday and Monday nights are consistently the best value of the week, which is unusual and worth exploiting.
Parking in the Cathedral Quarter is genuinely awkward. If you are driving the coast, either take a hotel with parking or plan to collect the car on the morning you leave the city. Airport transfers from Belfast City Airport are ten minutes and cheap, and from Belfast International around thirty.