Whitbread buys seven Holiday Inns for over £30m

Whitbread has bought seven Holiday Inn-branded hotels from property consortium LRG for £34.5m.

Each hotel will be refurbished and converted to the company's Premier Travel Inn brand.

The sites are South Mimms, Middlesex; Hampstead in London; Peterborough; Leicester South West; Carlisle; Newcastle City Centre and Cardiff North.

The purchase adds 1,021 rooms to Premier Travel Inn, which now has more than 31,000 rooms and 474 hotels in the UK.

Whitbread announced last week that it wants 45,000 rooms for its budget business by 2010.

LRG constitutes Realstar Group, Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners and GIC Real Estate.

Last October it put a package off 11 non-core hotels on the market for around £60m, which included these seven.

In a separate deal, LRG has sold a Holiday Inn hotel in Glasgow to existing IHG franchisee European Development Company (Hotels).

• The Financial Times has reported that the Royal Bank of Scotland is in talks with the Whitbread-Marriott joint venture to buy 46 UK hotels for more than £1b. The joint venture hotels are operated by US hotel chain Marriott, which will continue to run the hotels after the deal.

By Chris Druce

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