A redundant Liverpool office block is being converted into a discount EasyHotel, the super-cheap hotel chain founded by Easyjet tycoon Stelios Haji-Ioannou.
Confirmation of the £3m scheme to transform 47 Castle Street in the centre of the city came on the same day that an unnamed organisation — thought to be a Government department — has hired property consultancy Bilfinger GVA to find it a new 500,000 sq ft office on Merseyside.
Modelled on EasyJet’s winning formula of customers booking basic bedroom accommodation as early as possible to get the best rate and then paying for extras such as housekeeping, the internet and refreshments as they need them, the company’s Liverpool site will be EasyHotel’s 20th venue. It already offers 1,300 rooms across its directed owned or franchised locations.
“This acquisition in the centre of Liverpool is fully in line with our strategy to expand our owned hotel portfolio into targeted major UK cities,” explained EasyHotel’s chief executive, Simon Champion. “It provides us with the opportunity to create a centrally located hotel for leisure and business customers looking for good quality accommodation at an affordable price.”
He said: “Liverpool has substantial inbound tourism, with over half a million visitors per annum, aided by recent inward investment and one of the UK’s busiest airports … This combined with domestic demand means it is an attractive location for an EasyHotel.”
The ground floor of its newly acquired Castle Street building is currently occupied by the Salt House Bacaro restaurant. It will remain open while EasyHotel converts the empty four upper floors of the office building into a 68-bedroom hotel. If planning permission is forthcoming, the hotel should be open by the spring of next year.
Founded in 2004, nine years after Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched EasyJet, the hotel chain opened its first hotel in South Kensington, London, in 2005. Although still affiliated to Stelios’s EasyGroup, EasyHotel now operates as an independent company.
Although Liverpool City Council has done its best to discourage the conversion of old or vacant office property it has allowed schemes to go ahead “which would bring jobs to an area no longer attractive to office-based businesses”.
If, as Bilfinger GVA suggest, a new Government department is about to join the UK Borders Agency and the Ministry of Defence in the city there is very little large office space available — certainly not the half-a-million square feet the agency is looking for.
And although Manchester has been included in the Bilfinger brief, David Thwaites and Ian Steele from its Manchester office have launched their search by contacting Merseyside agents.
They are looking for 180,000 to 230,000 sq ft of office space in Liverpool city centre or out-of-town options across Merseyside within close to a major public transport hub. Another option would be a self-contained property within the city centre of between 450,000 and 500,000 sq ft.
At the moment Liverpool could not supply Grade A space on that scale, with the Peel Group’s planned eight-storey, 100,000 sq ft William Jessop House development at Princes Dock — planned as part of its £5.5bn Liverpool Waters scheme — as the only pre-let coming close.
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