Travelodge has announced that it will develop smaller ‘Metro’ style hotels, in prestigious locations and in office blocks across the UK to allow the brand to access new areas.
Travelodge will look to open 100 Metro hotels, which will be between 20 to 40 rooms in size, by 2020 to allow the budget hotelier to open in highly priced and much sought after locations across the UK.
These locations include the City of London, London Boroughs such as Kensington Chelsea, Westminster, Fulham and Richmond, and major UK cities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, Cardiff, York, Bristol, Chester, St Albans and Edinburgh.
Travelodge will also look to use the model to open hotels on the UK coastline and popular holiday hotspots like Cornwall, Devon, the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and near to theme parks.
The ‘Metro’ hotel model will allow the budget hotelier to open in suburban locations where larger sites may not be popular with local authorities and development land is at a premium, and also to expand its presence in areas where it already has a larger hotel.
Properties that will be considered under this new scheme include floors in office buildings, business parks, pubs, old cinemas and theatres, snooker halls, listed buildings, retail outlets and derelict buildings.
The initiative to build smaller Travelodge hotels comes after two development ventures the company invested in during 2010. The first was opening a ‘Metro’ style prototype hotel in one of Edinburgh’s busiest tourist areas, Rose Street just off Princes Street. Travelodge built a hotel in a Georgian listed building which also houses two bars and a restaurant. The 43-room hotel sits above the three properties and has a small entrance sandwiched between the bar and restaurant. The hotel has become one of the company’s top performing hotels due to its key location.
The second venture to support the ‘Metro’ style Travelodge concept was the conversion of 52 Innkeeper’s Lodge’s into the Travelodge estate following their purchase from Mitchells Butlers in July 2010. The majority of these acquired hotels are under 40 rooms and have proven to be highly profitable additions for Travelodge.
Guy Parsons, chief executive of Travelodge Hotels, said: “Following the success of our Edinburgh ‘Metro’ prototype hotel and the conversion of 52 Innkeeper’s Lodges to the Travelodge brand, we have discovered just how profitable smaller hotels can be for us. Therefore to accelerate our growth strategy we are going to start building ‘Metro’ style hotels across the UK. This concept will allow us to open hotels where other hoteliers can’t develop.
“Downsizing our hotel building requirements will open hundreds of development opportunities for us. This will enable us to expand quickly and meet the growing demands from consumers who want low cost and good quality accommodation in prime locations.”
This new building approach will run alongside Travelodge’s existing growth strategy to expand to 1,100 hotels and 100,000 rooms by 2025. The ‘Metro’ style properties will still be called Travelodge hotels and the room size will be based on a standard double Travelodge room of 15sq ft.
Travelodge currently has 472 hotels and over 32,000 rooms across the UK and is currently building 40 hotels this year.