Whitbread reports strong progress in challenging market despite profit fall

22 October 2019 by
Whitbread reports strong progress in challenging market despite profit fall

Whitbread said it continues to make strong strategic progress in challenging market conditions, despite reporting a decline in profits.

The Premier Inn parent company, which has 90,000 open and committed rooms in the UK, recorded a 0.1% fall in revenue in the first half of the financial year to £1b, with pre-tax profits of £251m, down from £266m the previous year.

Whitbread reported that total accommodation sales fell by 0.6%, with like-for-like sales contracting by 3.6%. It said weaker regional market conditions had a particular impact, but that an efficiency programme was continuing to tackle this.

Whitbread chief executive Alison Brittain said: "We have delivered a resilient first-half profit performance despite challenging market conditions in the UK. Shorter-term trading conditions in the UK regional market have been difficult, particularly in the business segment, where we have a higher proportion of our revenue, while trading in London remained strong.

"Against this challenging backdrop, we have a number of activities under way, which continue to build our brand strength as the UK's favourite hotel chain. We are enhancing and optimising our UK hotel network and have successfully trialled new higher-specification Premier Plus rooms in two hotels, with fantastic customer feedback. We are on track to have 500 Premier Plus rooms this year, with ambitions for a total of 2,000 over the next year. We have also made good progress in delivering our ambitious efficiency targets, helping to offset part of the ongoing industry-wide inflation."

The company said it was also accelerating growth in Germany, where it has almost 8,000 open and committed rooms.

Whitbread has also completed a capital return programme that saw £2.5b returned to shareholders following its sale of Costa last year.

The Caterer Breakfast Briefing Email

Start the working day with The Caterer’s free breakfast briefing email

Sign Up and manage your preferences below

Check mark icon
Thank you

You have successfully signed up for the Caterer Breakfast Briefing Email and will hear from us soon!

Jacobs Media Group is honoured to be the recipient of the 2020 Queen's Award for Enterprise.

The highest official awards for UK businesses since being established by royal warrant in 1965. Read more.

close

Ad Blocker detected

We have noticed you are using an adblocker and – although we support freedom of choice – we would like to ask you to enable ads on our site. They are an important revenue source which supports free access of our website's content, especially during the COVID-19 crisis.

trade tracker pixel tracking