Whitbread PLC, the UK’s largest hotel company and owner of Premier Inn, has acquired the freehold of two hotels in Bristol and Plymouth from Canadian-based hotel company Future Inns. The purpose-built hotels, on William Prance Road in Plymouth and at Bristol’s Cabot Circus, will add 292 bedrooms to Whitbread’s UK portfolio.
Conversion to Premier Inn bedrooms
More than half of the rooms are set to open as Premier Inn bedrooms at the beginning of November. Whitbread says it will have 155 of the hotel bedrooms ready to book as Premier Inn rooms by November 2. The re-branded Premier Inn hotels will then continue to trade as the company refurbishes the remaining rooms, with the transformation of the two locations scheduled to complete in mid-December.
The properties were bought for an undisclosed sum. In September, Bristol Live reported the Bristol hotel had been sold to a new operator, although it was not known at the time the deal was with Whitbread.
Strategic acquisition
Alex Flach, development director for Whitbread in the UK & Ireland, said the Bristol and Plymouth Future Inns would “strengthen” the firm's portfolio of properties in those cities. “We see strong long-term demand and want to grow further, and as we are converting the buildings into Premier Inns rather than building the hotels from scratch, we can bring our new rooms on stream very quickly for our customers,” he said.
“Being able to convert the hotels quickly into Premier Inns was very attractive to us when we were considering the acquisition. Both the Plymouth and Bristol hotels are the right size for us and being built in the mid-2000s, we can convert the purpose-built hotels relatively easily into latest format Premier Inns.”
Mr Flach added: “In a market characterised by supply constraints and high development costs, we are increasingly looking at going concern sales to grow our market-leading brands, and we are keen to hear from other operators who are considering their portfolios.”
Network expansion and Future Inns transition
Once open, the two hotels will grow Premier Inn’s network to four hotels in Plymouth city centre and five in central Bristol. Future Inns, meanwhile, has one other hotel in Cardiff which will continue to trade.
Del Brett, managing director of Future Inns UK, said: “Having developed and operated three Future Inns properties in the UK since 2005, it has been an important milestone for our company to sell our Plymouth and Bristol properties to Whitbread this year. Our company is transitioning at this time to the operation of our 197-bedroom original UK property in Cardiff Bay, which will continue to trade for the foreseeable future as Future Inn, offering the same high standards of accommodation, conferencing, and foodservice we have provided for many years.”
The news comes as Common Table Group, a British hospitality operator, announced it had acquired nearly 60 restaurants from Whitbread following its closure of the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre chains last month. Knight Frank and Enterprise Hotels & Hospitality acted for Future Inns on the transaction, while Whitbread’s in-house property acquisition team represented the FTSE-100 hotelier.
