Budget hotel chain expands across UK further
Travelodge has exchanged on 22 new properties across the UK at a cost of £165 million.
The group has also inked a £10 million deal with retailer Arcadia to construct a 96-room Travelodge in summer 2012 above its Top Shop store in Edinburgh’s Princes Street.
This will increase Travelodge’s room stock in the Scottish capital to 1,230 rooms across 13 properties.
The new hotels will open on five London sites, Walthamstow, Enfield, Bethnal Green, Sutton and Southgate, as well as at Gatwick and Glasgow airports plus Edinburgh Queen Street, Eastleigh, Loughborough, Sittingbourne, Bedford, Darlington, Altrincham, Malvern, Aylesbury, Newquay, Woking, Hemel Hempstead, Kings Lynn and Barcelona.
The budget hotel chain has already opened 18 hotels in the first half of 2011 and is now in the middle of building 43 hotels, that’s 4,280 rooms, with 21 of these properties are anticipated to open before the end of this year.
Once they are built, these new sites will bring the Travelodge estate to 540 hotels and 39,957 rooms. These new hotel openings will also create 1,300 new jobs across the country.
Travelodge chief executive Guy Parsons said: “The strength of Travelodge’s growth model has clearly been demonstrated, with the first six months of 2011 being the strongest in the company’s history. We are not just exchanging contracts but most importantly finance is being secured upfront, to enable our developers to start on-site immediately. Everybody knows how difficult it is to obtain bank funding at the moment, so to have financed so many new schemes must be one of the biggest success stories of the UK property industryâ€.
“Arcadia forward funding our new hotel in one of the most prestigious locations in Edinburgh just demonstrates how flexible the Travelodge development model is. Situated over four floors above Edinburgh’s biggest Topshop store on Princes Street, we will be utilizing space that was previously used for office and storage space. Given the lack of new development sites in central Edinburgh this really is one of the most prominent sites left in the city and we are delighted to have secured it.â€
Dinah
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