Tim Scoble

21 September 2006

Overall ranking: 98

Hoteliers ranking: 24

Tim Scoble - Snapshot Tim Scoble is the chief executive officer of Thistle Hotels which operates 49 hotels, of which 30 are managed and the rest owned or leased.

Thistle has an annual turnover in excess of £300m and is the UK's seventh largest hotel group by bedroom number. Its 16 London properties make it the biggest player in the capital.

It dates back to Mount Charlotte Hotels of the 1960s and gained its current identity after Mount Charlotte bought 34 Thistle hotels and the Thistle name from Scottish & Newcastle in 1989.

Tim Scoble - Career guide Tim Scoble is a qualified chartered accountant who has clocked up more than 15 years' in the restaurant, hotel and pub/bar business on top of 13 years' experience in finance with the fast-moving-consumer-goods and leisure retailing sectors.

He spent two years with Queens Moat, where he looked after three Holiday Inns and 39 Moat House hotels in the UK.

Scoble then moved to the Little Chef roadside chain where he was chief executive officer responsible for 350 Little Chef restaurants alongside 110 Burger King outlets, a number of Compass branded offers, and 40 petrol forecourts.

He joined Thistle as chief executive officer in January 2006.

Tim Scoble - What we think
Thistle has undergone some major changes since BIL, the group's majority shareholder since 1990, launched a successful hostile takeover bid to take the company private again and (not for the first time) ousted its former management team.

Believing Thistle had underperformed since it floated on the London stock market in 1996, BIL launched a £554.7m bid in March 2004. Thistle fought the bid but shareholders accepted an improved offer of £627m in May.

Thistle has, since the takeover, shifted power from the centre to the general managers, abandoned its "one-size-fits-all" approach, and disposed of non-core properties.

Since taking control in 2006, Scoble has reorganised the senior management team to refocus on the brand positions of Thistle and the new Guoman brand.

Since 2004, Thistle has been upgrading and modernising its offer to regain the more upscale position it had held a decade before. "We want to be in the four- to five-star sector instead of the three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half star range where we are," chairman Arun Amarsi explained in 2004.

And the flagship of this drive is the new global deluxe brand, Guoman, which means "international gateway" in Mandarin.

The name will be used on a line of upscale, international hotels in major cities and will take the company outside the UK for the first time. In April 2006, it emerged that Thistle was looking to make its overseas debut in India first, opening hotels in three or four cities at a time. A decision was expected by the end of 2006.

The first UK hotel to receive the Guoman makeover was the 1,019-bedroom Cumberland hotel at Marble Arch, which was relaunched in October 2004 after a £59m revamp.

The Tower Thistle has since been converted into a second Guoman property and the Royal Horseguards, Thistle Victoria and Thistle Charing Cross have also been earmarked for conversion to the new deluxe format.

Thistle has recently forged sales and marketing alliances with US-based Affinia Hotels (including New York's luxury The Benjamin hotel), First Hotels of Scandinavia and Middle Eastern group Rotana Hotels to create an international hotel network across key markets.

Thistle Hotels profile on CatererSearch

Thistle Hotels official websites

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