Premier Inn inks Abu Dhabi Airport hotel deal

Premier Inn, the UK budget hotel chain, has signed a deal with Abu Dhabi Airports Company to develop a hotel at Abu Dhabi’s International Airport, which it hopes to break even on within three years.

Britain’s biggest hotel chain will spend AED120m ($32.7m) building the approximately 300-room hotel at Terminal 3, which is set to open during the first half of 2020.

Darroch Crawford, managing director of Premier Inn Hotels, told Arabian Business he expected the project to break-even within three years.

“We’ve done a feasibility study based on a higher occupancy rate, over 80 percent, but we believe that over 100 percent is achievable because of the transit nature of the customers. We could recover in approximately three years.”

The hotel will be priced at around AED400 per room, in line with current prices at Premier Inn’s three existing Dubai branches, and linked to Terminals 1 and 3 by an air-conditioned corridor.

Premier Inn, which is owned by UK conglomerate Whitbread, plans to open more than 50 hotels in the Middle East over the next decade.

“We’ll look to have at least 50 hotels and be represented in all major cities in the Middle East,” said Crawford.
Around 25 of those hotels are slated to open in Saudi Arabia.

“It’s got the biggest potential of all of the countries in the region because of the size and the population. It could be more. We have 592 hotels in the UK alone so, if we can do 592 in the UK, then surely you can do 25-plus in a country the size of Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Other planned Premier Inn hotels in the region include Doha – scheduled to open in the first half of 2012 – and Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, which is expected to begin operations in September, 2011.

“If you look at the region as a whole, internationally-branded budget hotels are almost unknown so there’s fantastic potential [for us],” said Crawford.