New economic analysis shows Premier Inn guests contribute more than £3m each year to communities that host them
Whitbread PLC, the UK’s largest hospitality business and owner of Premier Inn, today unveiled an illuminating economic impact report analysing the contributions of Premier Inn hotels to the UK economy.
The research found that Premier Inn guests typically spend £137 externally on items such as entertainment, with £79/night (56% of the total spending) being spent in the local area within which their chosen Premier Inn is located. This spending figure relates to the average external spend per bedroom per night and excludes accommodation costs.
Applying this logic on a national basis, Whitbread calculates that spending by its guests on food, drinks, entertainment, shopping, and local transportation could be contributing £1.6 billion annually to those catchments that have a Premier Inn. This is equivalent to an average annual benefit of £3.3 million in visitor expenditure for local businesses in each Premier Inn hotel location.
The research, which was undertaken by IPSOS and Turley Economics, was commissioned as part of Whitbread’s Force for Good initiative – an important part of which is making a meaningful contribution to the customers and communities served by the Group.
The comprehensive study involved surveying over 12,600 Premier Inn guests staying in 357 Premier Inn hotels across the UK within 24-hours of check-out. These hotels were chosen to help Whitbread understand the visitor preferences and spending habits of its guests across unique settings, encompassing Adventure, Coastal, Cultural, City Centre, Central London, and Inner London destinations.
More than half (54%) of the respondents revealed that they exclusively considered Premier Inn for accommodation and 28% said that they would not have visited their chosen location had Premier Inn not been located there, underscoring the distinctive role of Premier Inn’s budget hotel offer compared to independent B&Bs, guest houses, Airbnbs, and more upscale 4 and 5-star establishments within the same locations.
Food and drink and entertainment were the top categories of spending for Premier Inn guests followed by non-food shopping and travel. The amount spent by guests also varied across the six categories of locations surveyed, with Premier Inn customers staying in city centre locations spending the most during their stay.
Alex Flach, UK Development Director in the UK & Ireland for Whitbread, said:
“From shopping to sight-seeing, local dining to local drinks, this analysis shows the positive economic impact of Premier Inn hotels on local economies across nations and regions of the UK.
“As a business, we are committed to using our scale and national footprint to make a positive difference to people’s lives and to create long-term value. We are delighted that, for the first time, we can demonstrate clear evidence of the economic impact our hotels have on the communities they serve.”
Whitbread, which currently operates more than 840 hotels across the UK and Ireland, has bold growth plans for its brands as it continues to expand into a structurally changing hotels market.
In addition to the local economic impact of its hotels, the company operates an industry leading apprentices programme and offers paid-for time to support local charitable initiatives as part of each new site opening. More details of this, and the work for the Force for Good initiative are available in the recently published ESG Report.
Read the full report here
