Rooms with a view

"Look at this - the best view from any restaurant in London," declares Anthony Harris, the infectiously enthusiastic managing director of Stakis Hotels. Follow his gaze and look out of the window of Aspects, the rooftop restaurant at the London Metropole Hotel, and there is a sense that he is excited more by what he can see in the future than the vista before him.

True, the 24th-floor restaurant does give a good vantage point for seeing over the city skyline, but look directly below the window and the sights are none too attractive.

The location of the London Metropole, now renamed the Stakis London Metropole, is not exactly prestigious. It may be within reasonable distance of the West End, one minute's walk from Edgware Road Tube station, but the streets surrounding it are unappealing, and there is a run-down, drab feel to the district.

Renaissance

But that is all set to change. Westminster Council plans a renaissance of the Paddington Basin, and one of the Stakis group's latest acquisitions will be at the heart of it. Added to this, the hotel is within brisk walking distance of Paddington Station, which next year will have a fast link to Heathrow. Many millions of people who fly into the world's busiest international airport are expected to take the new service, which will bring them right into the catchment area of the London Metropole.

In anticipation of all this extra business, Stakis is currently working on plans to extend the 745-bedroom hotel by converting the car park next door to a new wing. This would add an extra 350 bedrooms and two conference rooms with capacity for 100 delegates.

According to Harris, the proposal, which he estimates will cost up to £90m to put into effect, is to go before the Stakis board for approval later this summer. Planning permission for the extension had already been granted when Stakis bought the Metropole group last November but, with disarming honesty, Harris admits they did not know this when they pursued the group for acquisition.

"We couldn't believe our luck," he recalls at the discovery of this extra bonus in the Metropole deal. It was a deal which Stakis proudly proclaims as the largest in the company's 50-year history. The sale price was £325m and, for that money, Stakis was able to boost its network to 52 hotels with the addition of five four-star hotels, including one each in London, Birmingham and Blackpool, and two in Brighton, giving a total of 2,266 rooms.

Opened up

Bringing the Metropole Hotels into the fold has opened up the large conference market for Stakis. In turn, Stakis is opening the doors of the small meetings business for the hotels, and also bringing them leisure-break bookings through promotion in the Stakis Holidays brochure.

On the leisure side, Stakis has ambitious plans for its new acquisitions. The group is set for a major tilt at the special interest market and has recruited Stewart Jackson from Hilton as events manager to spearhead it. Harris envisages special packages devoted to hobbies such as stamp collecting, hosted by experts in the field, who would lure guests to hotels such as the Stakis Birmingham Metropole, where occupancy takes a nosedive when there is no major event at the NEC next door.

It will take another year for initiatives such as this to bring benefits to Metropole hotels. In the meantime, there are already some obvious indications that Stakis is now in charge.

For a start, the hotels' names have changed, albeit slightly in some cases. The 745-bedroom London Metropole and the 802-bedroom Birmingham Metropole retain the Metropole brand, though the Stakis tag is added.

In Brighton, where Metropole had two hotels, the situation was less clear-cut. The 328-bedroom former Metropole is now the Stakis Brighton Metropole and the smaller 129-bedroom Bedford is now simply the Stakis Brighton.

Metropole's 274-bedroom Pembroke is now the Stakis Blackpool, though that will help clear up the confusion there had been in the resort when the Metropole-owned Pembroke, focusing on the four-star conference market, was frequently mistaken for the Butlin's-owned Metropole, which targets the blue-rinse brigade.

Harris himself confused the two when first looking at the acquisition, and admits he was most surprised to discover on his visit to the hotel that its clients were older.

Apart from the name change, there are other pointers to tell loyal guests their favoured hotel has a new parent. Front-office staff wear a new uniform - 2,000 Stakis uniforms were dispatched on the day the hotels changed hands - and there is plenty of Stakis literature in evidence.

In the bedrooms, the changes have been so subtle it is unlikely anyone would notice, though they do back up the Scottish reputation for thrift, befitting the Glasgow-based company. Smaller shampoo bottles have been put in the bathrooms, and instead of having two pillows on each bed, guests get one, but can get a second from the wardrobe if it is required.

"The Metropole shampoo bottles were too big. They were always left half full," comments Harris, who justifies the pillow-in-the-cupboard tactic as a means to save on laundry bills. By such methods, he says, Stakis has already shaved the Metropole amenities bill by £150,000, while the food and liquor bill for the hotels has been reduced by £400,000 in year one because of Stakis's purchasing muscle.

Pragmatic policy

Guests may also have found that, under new ownership, there has been a change in the pricing policy. Harris says Stakis has a very pragmatic policy on rates and, if need be, prices will drop right down if that is what it takes to fill a bed.

"When Aviemore is empty," he says, "you can get a room there for £20. That is not a practice that the Metropole had. They stuck to their guns on prices, but we believe an empty room is an empty room and we will put out special offers. In the Brighton Metropole, you can get dinner, bed and breakfast for about £50. That sort of thing would have been unheard of with Metropole, but we've added four or five points to their occupancy by doing it."

Stakis is also expecting to save around £1.7m this year as a result of closing down Metropole's head office - which cost £2.78m in the year to September 1996 - and relocating its functions to Stakis's Glasgow HQ. Thirty jobs were axed as a result of the move, generating a one-off cost of £900,000 in redundancy payments.

Most sales staff have been retained, and all but one of the general managers have been kept on, though there has been some switching around between hotels. All ex-Metropole employees are aware that their new parent company has high expectations of them, and is looking for higher occupancy levels in London and higher rates in the provincial hotels.

"We have substantially stepped up our expectations from the business," says Harris. "We are a company that likes to move forward. We are never satisfied with yesterday."