Low cost furniture retailer Ikea is poised to unveil plans for a chain of hotels across Europe.
The UK, Holland, Poland and new markets such as Germany are reported to be under consideration for the chain of at least 100 budget hotels.
Inter Ikea, the company that owns the intellectual property rights of Ikea, is eyeing sites across Europe for what it calls “budget design” hotels, the Financial Times reported.
The hotels will not use the Ikea name and will not be run by the Swedish company but by an established hotel operator, according to an executive familiar with the plans, the newspaper said.
“We will announce within a few weeks the first location for our budget hotel in Germany and we are in talks with hotel operators to rapidly implement our concept,” Harald Müller, a senior manager in Inter Ikea’s property division, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany.