Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread has allocated £100m to turn sites previously earmarked for office and residential use into hotels.
The leisure group said today it would develop 1,000 more rooms across nine new Premier Inns, along with five new restaurants.
The new hotels will include planned office-block conversions in Preston and Doncaster, and two developments in
The other sites are at
Mark Anderson, property director for Whitbread, said: “This is bright news in increasingly gloomy economic times.
“We have disciplined targets for growth. These investments demonstrate that we are well on our way to delivering them. For us, it is more a case of opportunity bites than credit crunch.”
The company said about a quarter of all opportunities put to them are former office or residential developments which have fallen through due to the decline in residential and commercial property markets.
The new hotels are scheduled for completion by 2010-11.
Last week, Whitbread also confirmed it would swap 44 of its restaurants for 21 Express by Holiday Inn hotels, which are owned by Mitchells & Butlers. Each group of assets was estimated to be worth around £78m.
Whitbread operates chains including Premier Inn, Beefeater, Costa Coffee and Brewers Fayre.
