Oct 26, 2021
Premier Inn owner Whitbread spends £23m to retain staff
Whitbread is spending £23m to retain staff amid "Chronic" labour shortages and escalating cost pressures at its Premier Inn hotels. With the fight for labour becoming increasingly acute, Whitbread is paying a £10m bonus to staff that worked through the summer and stayed until the October half term holiday this week, and has increased staff salaries at a cost of £12m to £13m, it said. Whitbread has 18,000 rooms in its UK Premier Inn hotels, making it the UK's largest hotel chain, and a growing portfolio in Germany, where it operates about 5,000 rooms. Whitbread said increases to salaries and a one-off staff bonus would not prevent it returning to pre-Covid-19 revenues in 2022, a year earlier than it had previously forecast, thanks to the staycation boom. In its UK hotels, revenue per available room - the hotel industry's guiding metric - "Has the potential to return" to a pre-Covid run rate in 2022, Whitbread said.
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