Hotel firm expands presence across Yorkshire
MULTINATIONAL HOSPITALITY company AccorHotels is expanding its presence in Yorkshire as the business looks to take advantage of a growing number of overseas visitors to the region.
The French firm has signed deals for five new hotels in Yorkshire with four existing sites being taken over and rebranded and one new build.
Philip Lassman, vice president of development at AccorHotels UK and Ireland, said: “Signing five new hotels in Yorkshire is a great move for AccorHotels. It is a thriving region and we are happy to bolster our presence here.
“Our franchise and management partners are finding the variety and flexibility of our brands appealing.”
Mercure Leeds Centre has already opened after undergoing a makeover.
MGallery York, Mercure Kenwood Hall and Mercure Tankersley Manor will go through extensive renovations ahead of their opening dates, while ibis Budget Sheffield will be a new-build property.
All the hotels are set to open by first quarter of 2020.
The five new hotels, which will collectively offer 443 new Accor rooms in the region, are to be opened with different management and franchise partners as the group looks to take advantage of continued growth of tourism in Yorkshire.
Mr Lassman said: “The MGallery and Mercure brands in particular are designed to be flexible so they can incorporate local touches into the design and overall guest experience allowing the hotels to offer something truly different without wavering from the internationally recognised and expected standards.”
Yorkshire saw 1,274,000 visits from overseas in 2017, with visitors collectively spending 10,619,000 nights in the region driving revenues of £530m, according to analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) data by AccorHotels.
Accor says this was an increase of £52m compared to 2016 and shows the importance of the region for leisure and business travellers from all over the world.
York and Leeds, were in the top 20 cities in the UK ranked on number of visitors and revenues driven, with Sheffield, Bradford and Doncaster also in the top 50.
Thomas Dubaere, chief operating officer for Northern Europe at AccorHotels, said “Yorkshire is
a diverse region attracting business and leisure guests who have different requirements, which is why it is so strategically important that we are able to offer a wide range of brands to cater for the differing guest needs from luxury and midscale to economy and budget.
“This diversity of brands is important across all our hotels in the UK which by the beginning of 2019 will be 250 in total.
“In a global economy, hotels increasingly need to attract guests from all over the world, so we are seeing a lot of interest from hotel owners who want to have the power of an internationallyrecognised brand and global network behind them.”
Accor has more than 4,600 hotels, resorts and residences across 100 different countries.
Of the five new hotels opening in Yorkshire, the Mercure Leeds Centre has 59 rooms. The MGallery in York will have 47 rooms when it opens. While Mercure Kenwood Hall will feature 114 rooms.
Mercure Tankersley Manor, which will be the last of the five to open, with an opening date of the first quarter of 2020 pencilled in, is expected to have 98 rooms.
The newly built ibis Budget Sheffield is expected to be completed this year and will have the largest number of rooms at 125, the company said. AccorHotels has transformed its business from an owner-operator to a less capital-intense hotel-manager model.
The five new openings in Yorkshire will operate under a hotelmanager model and with the new signings Accor will have 24 hotels in the region.