Holiday Inn Express Belfast City, University Street

The University Street Holiday Inn Express, branded by IHG as the Belfast City Queens Quarter hotel, is a mid-range city centre hotel close to Queen's University and the Botanic Gardens. Belfast asylum hotel use rose sharply through 2022 as the Home Office began block booking properties to absorb backlog and small boats arrivals.

Mears Group holds the Home Office Asylum Accommodation and Support Services contract for Northern Ireland and provides most of the asylum accommodation across the region. The Irish News in November 2022 reported that at least eight Northern Ireland hotels were on Home Office contracts to house asylum seekers via Mears at that point, and named the Holiday Inn Express on University Street as one of the Belfast city centre hotels showing as fully booked during a sample search^[1]Press.

Days later, on 22 November 2022, MPs debated asylum seekers in contingency accommodation in Belfast in Westminster Hall. Hansard records that around 15 per cent of Belfast hotel rooms had been block booked for asylum use under the Mears contract, and that ministers had met Mears to commit the company to providing a named contact for each occupied building such as a hotel^[2]GOV.UK.

FactCheckNI's subsequent reviews confirm Mears as the dominant asylum accommodation provider in Belfast, although by mid 2025 Home Office data showed Belfast itself had no asylum seekers in supported hotels, with placements shifting to the Causeway Coast, Antrim, North Down and Derry council areas^[3]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], an approximately 100 room hotel block booked at full asylum occupancy implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £17,000 per night and roughly £6.2 million per year. That is broadly in line with the May 2025 NAO contract review average of about £5.84 million per year per hotel^[5]NAO.