Thistle bids farewell to Hospitality
Thistle Hotels will wave goodbye to the Hospitality Inn name for good in early April when its last property bearing the name reopens as the Thistle Middlesbrough.
The 70 staff needed by the new refurbished hotel are likely to include some of those made redundant when the old one closed, although Thistle said it would give no preferential treatment to former employees.
The hotel has undergone £8m worth of refurbishment and repair work since it closed in June 1998 for its floors to be strengthened after structural faults were found.
The project also discovered asbestos in the hotel, but it has now been removed.
Bedroom numbers have dropped from 184 to 132, but the four-star hotel will be Thistle's first to offer a business floor. The group claims the hotel's banqueting room, which will hold more than 400 people, will be the largest in Teesside.
The renamed hotel will also be the second from Thistle's portfolio to have the new Gengis Taste Revolution restaurant, whose mix of Asian and Mediterranean dishes was first introduced in the Thistle Glasgow last September.
A casino underneath the hotel, which had been rented to Stakis before the close-down, may be turned into a health club.
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 24 February - 1 March 2000
