The UK’s largest budget hotel chain, Premier Inn, saw total sales grow by 12.2% to £497.4 million in the first half of the year.
Parent company Whitbread reported underline profits up by 7.9% to £195.7 million for its hotels and restaurants division in the six months.
Premier Inn opened 1,368 UK rooms taking the total to 53,039 and is targeting 65,000 by 2016. Total revenue per available room grew by 2.7% with occupancy up 1.3% points to 80.3%.
The company expects Premier Inn grow to around 750 locations in 2016 and 830 in 2018.
Chief executive Andy Harrison revealed that the Premierinn.com website now accounts for 77% of bookings.
“In both dynamic pricing and our website, we will continue to invest in technology, specialist teams and make further improvements in our customer relationship management capability to enhance the customer experience and grow revpar,” said Harrison.
“One of the important levers for revpar growth is our dynamic pricing strategy enabling us to improve room rate whilst working towards our occupancy target of 80% on an annual basis.”
He said trends in the hotel market in London were “difficult to discern” due to the anniversary of the Olympics.
“However, Premier Inn grew total London sales by 18.4% as we increased the number of rooms available by 16.1% year on year and grew total revpar by 1.7%,” he said.
“Today we have a total of 53,039 UK rooms, which, combined with our committed pipeline of over 10,500 rooms, puts our 2016 milestone in sight.
“In April 2013, we announced a new five year milestone to reach around 75,000 rooms by 2018. This includes 3,000 rooms of our new compact city centre hotel brand, Hub by Premier Inn.
“We continue to make good progress in growing the pipeline for Hub and construction has started at the St Martins Lane, London site which is expected to open in the second half of next year.
“This year we expect to open around 4,000 new Premier Inn rooms and add a further 4,500 new rooms in 2014/15.”