Whitbread is set to invest £6 million in the development of five new Premier Inn hotels in Cornwall and Devon, UK this year, according to a report from CornwallLive.
The company, which also owns the Costa Coffee, Brewers Fayre pub and Beefeaters restaurant brands, will open the first of these hotels in Wadebridge. The 66-room Premier Inn property is slated to open in June 2018.
Whitbread will also begin construction on a Premier Inn hotel in Penzance later this year as part of the multimillion-pound investment. The company plans to convert a mill building near Penzance's train station into the new Premier Inn. Whitbread will follow up the new Penzance property with the construction of a Premier Inn hotel in Newquay.
In Devon, Whitbread has plans to develop two new hotels in Tiverton, east Devon and in Plymouth. The 100-room city center hotel in Plymouth is part of a £50-million project to redevelop the site of a former Derry's Cross department store into a Premier Inn. The hotel is scheduled to open in summer 2019.
The new hotels coming to Cornwall and Devon are part of Whitbread's expansion across the UK. They are the most recent pipeline additions, following the 31 new sites planned for redevelopment into Premier Inn hotels between 2017 and 2018.
"We’re continuing to grow Premier Inn and its restaurant brands in the UK," Paul Smith, regional acquisition manager at Whitbread, told CornwallLive. "We have many existing hotels in Devon and Cornwall. However, we still have requirements for new Premier Inn hotels in towns where we have no current representation across the two countries."
The new Premier Inn hotels will be developed with different formats and sizes. Two of the new hotels in Cornwall will have Brewers Fayre restaurants. Three of the new Devon properties will have Brewers Fayre restaurants, while the remaining five will have Beefeater restaurants.
Whitbread already has nine operating Premier Inn properties in Cornwall while Devon has 16 operating Premier Inn hotels. The most recent Premier Inn opening in Cornwall was a 67-room hotel in Bude. The property began operating in January 2018, following a £5-million investment. The Cornwall Council granted Whitbread full planning permission for the Bude property in November 2015. The company converted the site of the former Strand Hotel—one of the tallest buildings in Bude—into the Premier Inn, demolishing the original building and constructing the new one from the ground up.
Whitbread also plans to develop a 70-room Premier Inn in Falmouth. However, the Cornwall Council denied the application three times in the past few years. The company appealed the decision for a fourth time with The Planning Inspectorate. The council hasn't scheduled a date for the final decision yet.