HVS Hospitality Enews Europe - W/e 4 April 2003
Le Meridien Uses Alchemy To Turn Hotels Into Gold - Le Meridien has sold three of its UK four-star hotels. Two of the properties, the 199-room Le Meridien Queens in Leeds and the 218-room Le Meridien Warwick, were snapped up by Quintessential Hotels (QH), a newly formed leisure investment group that has the backing of private equity firm Alchemy Partners.
Le Meridien Uses Alchemy To Turn Hotels Into Gold - Le Meridien has sold three of its UK four-star hotels. Two of the properties, the 199-room Le Meridien Queens in Leeds and the 218-room Le Meridien Warwick, were snapped up by Quintessential Hotels (QH), a newly formed leisure investment group that has the backing of private equity firm Alchemy Partners. Both hotels will be managed by the Paramount Hotel Group; its Managing Director Michael Purtill is also the head of QH, which plans to acquire another ten hotels over the next two years. QH paid a reported £22 million for the Le Meridien Warwick, which will now undergo a £3 million refurbishment and revert to its original name of the Chesford Grange Hotel. Le Meridien Queens, henceforth to be known as The Queens Hotel, was sold for a reported £18 million. This hotel too will be refurbished, starting next January and ending in spring 2005, with the work here costing £8 million. In the third sale, Le Meridien was tickled by Liverpudlian hotelier Paul Feather's acquisition of the Queen Hotel in Chester for some £6 million. The 128-room Grade II listed property was one of six hotels formerly belonging to the Principal Hotels chain that Le Meridien put up for sale last May. Mr Feather, who now has eight hotels in northwest England, will be spending an additional £3.5 million on the renovation of his latest acquisition.
Bharat Close To Finding A Home In London - Bharat Hotels, which is based in New Delhi, is reportedly close to acquiring a lifestyle hotel at an unspecified location in London. The hotel would be the company's first outside India, where it owns seven luxury properties totaling more than 1,600 rooms. In common with those hotels, the London property would operate under The Grand brand name. In addition, the company would like to pair up with an international hotel chain to manage a similarly branded five-star hotel in the emirate of Dubai.
Knights Commanded By The Order Of Thistle - In the week in which BIL International threw down the gauntlet by formally distributing details of its 115p-a-share takeover offer to its fellow shareholders in Thistle Hotels, the Thistle board responded by calling in the heavy armour in the shape of seven white knights. The Sunday Telegraph newspaper named the seven as Realstar Group, Apax Partners, Starwood Capital, Accor, Westbrook, Westmont Hospitality, and Blackstone Group. Thistle, while it mentioned no names, confirmed that it had received approaches from a number of parties that might make counterbids for the company or possibly acquire certain hotel assets. Press reports last month suggested that Thistle might sacrifice six London hotels to finance a special dividend to be used to sweeten shareholders in the face of BIL's bid for the remaining 54.2% of the shares; Thistle has already dismissed that bid as being wholly inadequate. BIL has risen to Thistle's latest challenge by stating that it would hold on to its existing 45.8% stake for at least 12 months in the face of a competing offer, and by expressing its desire for an EGM at which it would propose changes be made to the size and composition of the Thistle board. This latter move was interpreted by some observers as meaning the toppling of Chief Executive Ian Burke, and others. Thistle Hotels rejected the EGM idea; the jousting continues.
Mirage City Is Real Enough - Egypt has welcomed the JW Marriott brand to its shores for the first time, after Marriott International opened the 428-room de luxe five-star JW Marriott Hotel, Mirage City in Cairo. Further east, in Saudi Arabia, the expansion and refurbishment of the 375-room Riyadh Marriott Hotel is one of the many projects for which the Saudi Hotels and Resort Areas Company has set aside some US$8 million. Meanwhile, in the west of the country, the Medina Research & Studies Centre, with support from the Islamic Development Bank, is looking to invest US$7.8 million in the construction of a 130-room hotel and a commercial complex in the city of Medina. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Thomas Gertz has been appointed Rotana Hotels' Area Director of Operations in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Another Hotel, Vicar? - Hoteles Playa is to open three hotels under its Senator brand over the next two years in the Andalusia region of southern Spain. The opening of the 123-room, five-star Senator Golf America in the town of Vícar at the start of 2004 will be preceded, at the end of 2003, by a 90-room hotel in Cádiz and followed in 2005 by an 85-room hotel in Granada. The Spanish company is also set to have a second hotel in Madrid this spring when it opens the 171-room Hotel Senator España. Meanwhile, Hoteles Playa's compatriot NH Hoteles has confirmed that it is one of 18 companies interested in acquiring a stake in the Portuguese staterun Pousadas de Portugal chain of 44 hotels. The successful bidder would also be obliged to purchase a 37.6% stake in Enatur, the company which manages the chain. Elsewhere in Spain, Spanish financiers Santander Central Hispano have sold their Barcelona headquarters to the Reig family for a reported €73 million. The new owners might now convert the building into a luxury hotel.
Olympic Events - Greek hotel operator Porto Carras is to transform itself into a real estate investment company by merging with real estate company EDAP and then changing its name to Technical Olympic Real Estate. Porto Carras' parent, the construction group Technical Olympic, will take a 63% stake in the new company, which already has €40 million to spend on the acquisition of hotel complexes on Crete and Rhodes, and on the Cyclades in the southern Aegean.
Fry's Cardiff Delight: Full Of Western Promise - Cosmo Fry, a descendant of the chocolate maker Joseph Fry, has paid Ballast Wiltshire £2.9 million for the freehold of the 81-room Big Sleep Hotel in Cardiff, south Wales. Mr Fry, whose Bedfactory Hotels Group operates the property, was backed on this occasion by the Royal Bank of Scotland, but he might seek financial support for future expansion from the likes of actor John Malkovich, who already has a stake in the two-star, designer Big Sleep Hotel. Fry would like to open a Big Sleep hotel in Bristol and/or Bath, with the property or properties coming into operation next year. He might even take the brand across the Atlantic and open a hotel on New York's Lower East Side.
Ramada Encore II: Son Of York - The UK was the first European country to hear of the Ramada Encore brand when a 104-room property opened in York last June. Now, Ramada International has introduced the brand to Switzerland by opening the 130-room Ramada Encore Hôtel La Praille in Geneva. Meanwhile, in nearby Slovakia, Dutch company Myria Assets, through its subsidiary Diamond Hotels Slovakia, is poised to seal its US$12.1 million acquisition of the 222-room Hotel Forum in Bratislava, after the Slovak government gave the sale its blessing. Further east, guests at the three-star Best Western Parc Hotel in the Romanian capital Bucharest can now avail themselves of substantial conference facilities after the unveiling of the US$1.2 million Parc Event Center.
Hotelier Receives Baptism In Bath - Laurence Beere, a former Operations Director with the Cliveden Group, has taken his first step into hotel ownership by acquiring the privately run 29-room Queensberry Hotel in Bath for £3.7 million. The lifestyle hotel contains the Olive Tree restaurant, which is expected to submit to renovation in early 2004. Meanwhile, the luxury 37-room Hustyns hotel in Wadebridge, north Cornwall, has been officially reopened after its £15 million refurbishment.
Room At The Top In Birmingham - Argent is to set aside the top four floors of its Eight Brindleyplace development in the centre of Birmingham for the introduction of its Livingbase serviced apartments. The building itself is one of three due to be occupied from next year onwards by the Royal Bank of Scotland. To the north of Birmingham, the Little Barrow Hotel in the city of Lichfield is under new ownership, after an unnamed purchaser paid £1.4 million for the 24-room, three-star property. Elsewhere in the West Midlands, the 54-room Holiday Inn Garden Court Wolverhampton, which stands at the Dunstall Park all-weather racecourse, could be extended under plans drawn up by course owner Arena Leisure and gaming group Gala for the UK's first 'racino': a combination of a racecourse and a casino.
HCE: A Salary Survey Worth Its Salt - HVS Executive Search is pleased to announce the launch of its HCE Hospitality Compensation Exchange® programme in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. A comprehensive survey of salary and benefit information of both corporate office and hotel property level positions, HCE has the ability to cross-reference the data by criteria such as location, position, company revenue, hotel type, and so forth. HCE has been enormously successful in North America, where compensation data on more than 5,000 hotels and 160 companies are now available, and participation in the surveys is free of charge. Forms for this year's surveys will be sent out within the next ten days, and the final reports will be published in July. If you are interested in participating, please contact Christopher Mumford. Additional information can be found on our website at
Thistle Hotels - Shares rose in value slightly on the back of press reports concerning the potential white knight bidders.
Hilton Group - The company was one of many on the FTSE 100 that suffered amid investors' fears of a prolonged conflict in Iraq.
Millennium & Copthorne - The particular virulence of the SARS virus in the Far East caused M&C's share price to plunge amid fears over the possible effect the outbreak could have on tourism.
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