Travelodge reveals £1m cost of riots

Chief executive Guy Parsons announced in a summer trading update that the riots led to more cancellations than bookings in 81 of its city-centre sites.

“Images of London burning and shops being looted flashed around the globe, stopping domestic and international travellers from leaving home,” Parsons said. “As a result our growth was lowered by two percentage points and cost the business a million pounds.”

Despite the chaos caused, the budget hotel chain still saw a sales growth of 19 per cent in London, compared with 15 per cent in the provinces. Brand occupancy also rose to 83 per cent and 15 new hotel exchanges were made throughout the UK.

And, with 35 per cent of Brits holidaying at home this summer due to big financial cutbacks among consumers, Travelodge were able to reap the benefits.

“The staycation break has been bigger than ever this summer,” added Parsons. “In response to this growing trend, we took a strategic decision to focus on increasing occupancy rates by lowering prices, funded by our efficient low cost base and allocated 1.5 million rooms at £19 or less. This resulted in our coastal, tourist cities and holiday hot spot Travelodge’s achieving very high occupancy throughout the summer.

The 15 new hotel exchanges that took place during this summer represent an investment of £105m and will create around 380 new jobs. The locations include eight properties across London at: Clapham, Wembley, Cricklewood, Harrow, Tooting, Woolwich, Bethnal Green and Sutton. The other locations are: Woking, Newquay, Ipswich, Sunderland, Burton, Crawley and Hemel Hempstead.

Meanwhile, rival Premier Inn has seen a rise in sales for the quarter as well. The Whitbread-owned low-cost chain reported that comparable sales were up 7.1 per cent.