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29
Oct
Premier Inn set to convert restaurant to more rooms at Hornbeam Park
Premier Inn looks set to convert The Park restaurant at its Hornbeam Park site into more rooms.
The south Harrogate hotel is one of more than 900 UK Premier Inn sites.
Whitbread Group PLC, which owns Premier Inn, is bringing lower-performing branded restaurants in-house and converting the remaining space into additional hotel rooms.
This means branded sites like The Park, at Hornbeam Park, will instead operate inside the hotel, under Premier Inn branding.
Whitbread, which attributed the move to reduced footfall from non-hotel guests, said in April:
Over the next 24 months we plan to replace around 112 of our lower-returning branded restaurants with integrated restaurants, and use the vacated space to add new higher-returning hotel rooms to help meet strong demand.
In fiscal year 2024, these branded restaurants generated an adjusted loss before tax of £19m.
At these locations, we will transfer the delivery of food and beverage for our hotel guests to an integrated restaurant that will be built inside the neighbouring hotel, mirroring the successful format of our 387 integrated restaurants that are already in operation across our estate.
Premier Inn at Hornbeam Park.
The Park is part of Table Table, which is also owned by Whitbread Group, and closed to non-hotel guests in July.
People staying at the adjoining Premier Inn can still eat and drink there.
The Stray Ferret asked Whitbread if The Park will be converted into hotel rooms as part of the plan.
A spokesperson said:
There will be more hotel rooms built at the site but how this looks specifically will be subject to planning consent etc., so no further details to share at the moment as we work through plans.
Food and beverage will, going forward, be served from a restaurant which is integrated into the hotel. This simply means it is inside/within the hotel as opposed to being a separate building.
Extra rooms will also be added to the hotel – likely in the form of an extension. Because there is planning etc. ongoing for all our sites, I can’t share details at the moment of specifically how this will look.
The move is part of Whitbread Group’s accelerating growth plan, which aims to add a further 3,500 hotel rooms to Premier Inn's portfolio.
Around 1,500 jobs – out of a total 37,000 – will be cut as part of the move, Whitbread said in April.
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