Portland Hotels reports healthy increase in profit and turnover

Portland Hotels, the owner and operator of five properties in Scotland, has reported an increase of 4% in turnover and 34% rise in profits.

Turnover for the company's last financial year, just reported, to 27 January 2013 was £14.8m, with profit before tax of £2.1m.

Colin Paton, founder of Portland Hotels, commented: "In a weak market, the trading performance of our company continues to be very impressive and we have delivered a healthy increase in pre-tax profits.

Annualised occupancies rose to almost 80% from 78% and room yield was up over 4% year on year.

"The company remains keen to secure third party management contracts throughout the UK from owners wishing to see similar strong performance from their own assets," he continued.

"We have a very credible, strong and experienced management team with a track record of delivering growth through managing operational efficiencies and making appropriate investment. In February of this year we expanded our board, appointing long serving executives Susan Valentine as sales & marketing director, and Brian Hutchison as commercial operations director."

Paton said that Portland has this year invested a further £500,000 in refurbishment programmes for the group's hotels - the Huntingtower, in Perth; Edinburgh City Hotel; Edinburgh Capital Hotel (pictured); Glasgow Pond; and the Speedbird Inn, Aberdeen.

Together the group has a collective room-stock of nearly 550 rooms.