Premier-Inn owner Whitbread has announced a new city centre hotel concept focused on cheaper, smaller rooms in the best locations.
The UK’s leading hotel group will open its first “Hub by Premier Inn” next summer in London’s St Martin’s Lane.
The group has committed to four further locations in central London, which will be opened between early 2015 and early 2016 – Goodge Street, Great Tower Street, King’s Cross and Spitalfields.
The FTSE 100 company is also planning to open hub hotels in Edinburgh and other city centre locations.
Whitbread said the hubs would be contemporary and compact with “excellent connectivity that will offer good value for money and appeal to customers who value price, location and design over space”.
Whitbread chief executive, Andy Harrison maintained there was enough room in the market for both its established budget Premier Inn brand and the new hubs.
He added: “We have 6% of the central London market at the moment so we think we’ve got a lot to go for.”
Hub rooms will be up to 30 per cent less than standard Premier Inn rates, with an average room costing less than £100 in central London.
The group is hoping to unveil 40 “hub by Premier Inn” hotels by 2018, with a total of 6,000 rooms.
The hotels will cost 25 per cent less to build and operate compared with a central London Premier Inn, Whitbread said.
Rooms will be 11.4 sq. metres and feature a desk that folds into a double bed, luggage storage beneath the bed, an en suite bathroom with power shower, 40-inch smart screen television and free Wi-Fi.
The rooms will be more high-tech with customers encouraged to use a hub app to book, check-in online and pre-select room, light and temperature settings, as well as television and radio channels.
Harrison said: “With substantial operating and commercial synergies from the Premier Inn network, we are confident that ‘hub’ will deliver good returns for our shareholders.”
Budget accommodation now accounts for over a third of all new hotels being built in Britain. Traditional hotel chains, including Premier Inn and Travelodge are under growing pressure to modernise.
Whitbread, which also owns Costa Coffee, has 650 Premier Inn hotels and more than 52,000 rooms across the UK and Ireland.
It said the new branded hotels would help it to reach its target of 75,000 UK rooms by 2018.
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