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Premier Inn reports sales up but revpar down

Sales at Premier Inn, the UK’s largest budget hotel chain, rose by 9% in the nine months to December 1.

Total room nights sold increased by 8.5% to 14.7 million as the Premier Inn continued to win UK market share, parent company Whitbread revealed today in a trading statement.

Total occupancy remained at 83.2% as capacity rose by 9.5%. However, total revenue per available room [revpar] was down by 0.7% against total market growth of 0.9% and dropped 6.5% in London.

Overall trading since the end of the three months to December 1 “is such that we expect to deliver full year results in line with expectations,” said Whitbread chief executive Alison Brittain.

She said: “We remain on track to open 3,700 new UK Premier Inn rooms and our committed pipeline stands at around 14,000 UK hotel rooms.

“We have also recently signed two additional sites in Germany – Freiburg and Essen – taking our committed German pipeline to five hotels.”

Brittain added: “Premier Inn grew total sales in the quarter by 9.2%. We have opened 15 hotels in the UK since the start of the year, increasing the number of rooms available by 9.7%, whilst maintaining occupancy at a high level of 84.5%.

“Like-for-like sales grew by 1.8% benefitting from our hotel extension programme which, as expected, diluted our like-for-like revpar, which was down 1.3%.”

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