Whitbread PLC

Description

Whitbread PLC is a UK-based company with prominent hotels, restaurants, and coffee shops. The company earns its revenue from operations of hotels, as the company operates about 875 hotels under the brand of Premier Inn. These hotels are spread over in the United Kingdom (more than 800 hotels) and Germany. The company also operates a chain of more than 400 restaurants and pubs under different brand names -- Premier Inn, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre, Table Table, Cookhouse & Pub, Bar+Block and Thyme. After tasting success in the UK, the company has ventured into Germany with its prestigious brand Premier Inn by opening its first hotel in Frankfurt in 2016.

The German market has the same characteristics as the UK, which makes it easy for Whitbread PLC to run its operations successfully. Germany turned out to be a highly attractive market for international expansion of the company. The German market had high levels of fragmentation and no leading budget hotel brand, like Premier Inn, which gave the company the opportunity to repeat the success of the UK model.

Beefeater is one of the well-known restaurant brands in the UK that are welcoming customers for more than 40 years. The company’s newest restaurant brand are Cookhouse & Pub, Brewers Fayre, and Whitbread Inns where people can come together and have freshly prepared dishes and cool drinks. Bar+Block Steakhouse is an informal, all-day dining restaurant that focuses on high-quality things. Thyme is Premier Inn’s in-house restaurant, which provides the customers or guests the contemporary British menu.

The company follows vertically integrated model that combines the property development & ownership, operations of hotel, the brand, and efficient distribution of inventory to have competitive advantage over others. The company through this model has control over its financials to fund development, look for optimal hotel locations, go for options like balanced freehold or leasehold, have a large network of long tenure, refurb control, estate management. The company has its own brand and has been consistently serving its customers by providing them with end-to-end operations and executing high standards at a low cost.