bank puts hotels under one roof
by Nigel Bartlett
UFB Humberclyde, the UK arm of French investment bank Compagnie Bancaire, has grouped six of its hotels into a single company and taken on their management.
The properties, all three-star independent hotels aimed at the corporate and conference market, came under the bank's control when their original owners hit financial difficulties.
The bank said the hotels had a combined turnover of £14m and were now trading profitably. They are being brought together to produce economies of scale in areas such as marketing, financial control, purchasing and staff training. They will, however, continue to be branded separately
The new company is to be known as United Hotels Group (UHG), headed by David Powell, who has been overseeing the bank's hotel portfolio for the past three years. He said UFB Humberclyde had lent the hotels funds for building or development before the recession and had been saddled with non-performing properties when their businesses failed.
"More than £1.5m has been spent on these hotels in the past few years and they are all now making a profit. It seems appropriate to group together properties with a common market sector," he said.
A further £1m is to be spent on improvements, including refurbishing 115 bedrooms at Hinckley Island Hotel in Leicestershire, installing a new health and leisure club at Ashbourne Lodge in Derbyshire and developing training facilities at Randell's Hotel at Skipton, North Yorkshire.
Selling off the properties is an obvious option for the bank, but according to Mr Powell no plans have been made for their long-term future.
"There's still a lot more to do to the properties yet before we decide what to do with them," he said.
Two of the properties, the Daventry Hotel in Northamptonshire (originally the Daventry Holiday Inn) and Kirtons Hotel in Reading, had been managed by Resort Hotels, and then Jarvis Hotels from June this year.
The fortunes of the four remaining hotels were turned around with the assistance of Oriel Leisure, which held a consultancy contract with the bank until spring this year.
The grouping will leave unaffected the bank's three other hotel properties, two inns in Surrey and the Peak District, and the Hatherton country house hotel in Staffordshire, operated by Lyric Hotels.
