Strong hotel trade pushes growth for Young’s

Although the company’s food and drink sales grew on a like-for-like basis, it was the business across its 16 hotels, based in London and the South East, which achieved the biggest growth. They helped push the group’s overall revenue up 11.8 per cent to £143m and adjusted profit up 7.2 per cent to £20.8m for the year ending 4 April 2011.

Young’s chief executive Stephen Goodyear said investment in the company’s hotel business such as upgrades of rooms and the revenue management systems, ‘was clearly bearing fruit.’

"​This has been a productive and exciting year for Young’s both with the trading improvements we are seeing in our business and the acquisition of Geronimo in December,” he said.

"Despite the ongoing backdrop of constrained consumer spending, the group has delivered a good set of results for the period whilst retaining our premium position and has seen strong momentum since the year end.”

Future potential ​

Young's launched a website in December www.youngshotels.co.uk​ which helped guests make bookings easier and which it hopes will enable the group to take advantage of the tourist market in the future.

Goodyear said the integration of Geronimo’s 26 pubs was also ‘proceeding as planned’ and that the company was ‘excited about the potential’ of both the Young’s and Geronimo brands.

Three new sites are expected to open this year under both brands: The Cow at Westfield in Stratford will open in September as a Geronimo pub while The Plough at Clapham Junction and the Wheatsheaf in Borough Market are due to re-open as Young’s managed houses in the second half of the year.

Board changes​

The company also used the release of its preliminary results to announce changes among its board members. Chris Sandland will stand down as non-executive chairman on 12 July and will be succeeded by former Courage managing director Nick Bryan.