Young's to add more bedrooms to pub estate

Young's is looking to add more bedrooms to its existing pub estate after its 351 hotel rooms saw revenue per available room increase 4.7% in the past year.

The pub group, which has spent the past two years positioning its 116 managed pubs into the premium end of the market, refurbished 67 rooms in its estate last year and has already lodged planning applications to add rooms to another ten of its pubs.

Patrick Dardis, retail director at Young's, told Caterersearch that the company was "quite a long way through" feasibility searches to add rooms to a further 20 of its pubs, including eight sites that had no rooms at all.

"With all these soulless hotels that have popped up everywhere in recent years it is great to have rooms with good quality food and good quality beer in an evening," Dardis said.

Meanwhile Young's chief executive Stephen Goodyear told Caterersearch that despite the company's push to increase its number of managed houses he was broadly happy with the current mix of 116 managed houses and 103 tenancies and leases.

"We always review our pubs as an individual business but I can see quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the coming year."

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By Christopher Walton

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