Focus Hotels plan for ten rescued hotels

09 February 2009 by
Focus Hotels plan for ten rescued hotels

The group that rescued ten Real Hotel Company (RHC) hotels from administration plans to refurbish the properties and invest in its sales force in a bid to survive the recession.

Focus Hotels Management, which is headed by Peter Cashman, currently provides management and management-services six hotels in London, Nottingham and Swindon, agreed to take on 10 hotel leases last week after the RHC collapsed into administration.

The ten saved hotels, which have a total of 780 rooms, are in Altrincham, Wigan, Wolverhampton, Hull, Hatfield, Chester, Northampton, Stafford, Blackburn and Telford.

They previously operated under the Quality and Clarion hotel brands.

Speaking to Caterersearch: "Cashman said the management company had identified the group of hotels it believed to be the ‘most financially viable'."

He said: "Over the last two years we've been slowly building up the company waiting for the right opportunity to come up.

We're planning to refurbish all ten properties extensively over the next 18-24 months, but will also initially work very quickly at rebranding the hotels, as the franchise agreement with Choice has ended, so we'll keep the original names of the hotels instead."

He also said he planned to keep the same 460 members of staff, and was putting a sales force into "every one of the units" to focus sales on local markets, as well as using large internet booking agencies.

"We've been successful in our management of the other properties there's no reason why these won't be successful as well."

Focus Hotels safeguards 500 Real Hotel Group jobs>>

Choice Hotels International ends franchises with Real Hotel Group>>

Hotel insolvencies double; worse to come>>

The Real Hotel Group collapses into administration>>
By Gemma Sharkey

E-mail your comments to Gemma Sharkey here.

Caterersearch.com jobs
Looking for a new job? Find your next hotel job here with Caterersearch.com jobs

The Caterer Blog](http://www.caterersearch.com/blogs/catering-news-blog/) Catch up with more news and gossip on the Caterer Blog here
[Newsletters For the latest hospitality news, sign up for our e-mail newsletters.
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 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