Chelsea Village Kick-off

01 January 2000
Chelsea Village Kick-off

While Chelsea Football Club continues to dog the heels of Manchester United in the FA Premier League, it now has the opportunity to push its major rival into second place on the hospitality front. The opening of the four-star Chelsea Village Hotel at London's Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea FC, is a footballing first.

Recent years have seen all the major Premier League clubs investing heavily in add-on corporate, leisure and restaurant facilities in attempts to boost business on non-match days. Manchester United, as in almost every other aspect of the business of football, has led the way with the opening of Red Café and a 1,000-cover banqueting suite, the Manchester Room. Another title contender, Newcastle United, operates the acclaimed Magpie Room restaurant. Chelsea, though, is the first club to open a hotel.

The Chelsea Village Hotel is to be the centrepiece of the £100m redevelopment of the 12-acre Stamford Bridge site. When high-profile chairman Ken Bates took over the running of Chelsea FC in 1982, it immediately became his aim to turn the business into a hive of activity, with hotels, restaurants, conference and banqueting facilities, shops, a spa and leisure centre, and a museum. Bates wanted to create nothing less than "the Covent Garden of south-west London".

Into reality

The March 1996 launch on to the stock market of Chelsea Village plc, which owns Chelsea FC and the hotel, should allow Bates to turn his dream into reality by the millennium. On the date of the listing, Chelsea Village was valued at £53m; by 31 October 1997 it was worth £210m. The balance of finance required for the three-phase development has been acquired through a combination of bank loans and Bates's own purse.

Phase one of the redevelopment, at a cost of £35m, has seen the building of the Chelsea Village Hotel along with three restaurants, 46 apartments, and the 820sq m Galleria exhibition and banqueting suite, which faces on to the pitch. Bates himself owns one of the two penthouse suites in the residential area.

Phase two will include a second four-star hotel with 140 bedrooms, more restaurants and further apartments, while the final phase will involve a sports and leisure complex and offices.

Originally due to launch on 1 December 1997, the opening of the Chelsea Village Hotel has been delayed several times to allow for the additional work required to upgrade the hotel from its originally planned three-star status.

When executive director and general manager Edward Murray arrived on the scene a little more than a year ago, he quickly realised that a three-star operation would not allow the hotel to charge the necessary rates required to cover the investment. Bates fully supported Murray's plans to press ahead with a more ambitious development.

Extra work

"I also believed that the simply serviced hotel that was planned was wrong for the location," Murray says. "The result has been a lot of extra work to increase the specification from a rather ordinary three-star property to a top four-star one."

This has included £70,000 being spent on each of the 160 bedrooms - which all now boast fax and modem facilities, satin-banded Egyptian cotton sheets and marble en suite bathrooms - as well as £500,000 on each of the four restaurants. The light, airy reception foyer, with its dark green, polished granite floors and columns, and mini-atrium at its centre, certainly gives the impression that no shortcuts were taken.

Central to offering upgraded facilities within a glamorous new hotel is the provision of a well-trained team of staff. Murray has done his utmost to ensure that he opens the hotel with the best possible complement of staff, the result of a 16-day national recruitment drive in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, as well as looking further afield to France, Italy, Scandinavia and Australia.

Incentive

"The hotel is the most exciting development of its kind in London at the moment, and I was conscious that we should be well represented by a good mix of people from around the UK, as well as abroad," says Murray. "Some of our recruits are very raw, and would previously never have dreamt of coming down to London from somewhere like Glasgow, but we have staff accommodation for 50 and that has been a great incentive."

Although the senior staff were on board many months before the opening, many of the 240 staff joined in early January and have since gone through an intensive training programme devised by a manager from the Hotel & Catering Training Company.

A central feature of the training has been the state-of-the-art Champs computer system for staff in front office and sales and marketing. This will enable Murray, on arrival at the hotel each morning, to see at the touch of a button who has stayed at the hotel, how much they have spent, total occupancy, total revenue, and complete histories of customers, among other information.

To represent the hotel world-wide, Murray appointed Utell International a year ago to market its facilities. Preferential corporate rates with all the major consortia across the world have been negotiated, including Hogg Robinson, American Express, Wagons Lits, Thomas Cook, Thor 24 and Expotel. This, together with Murray's visits to all the major travel shows world-wide over the past year, have resulted in advance bookings worth £1.25m prior to opening.

"It seems that we have a number of key selling points," says Murray. "The fact that we are a new build and providing brand new facilities, with air-conditioning throughout, is a major attraction, particularly to international business people. The fact that we have no single rooms in a market which is resisting pokey bedrooms is an advantage that we have over many five-star properties which still have single rooms. Grown-ups don't sleep in single beds at home and don't want to do so when they stay away.

"The location of the hotel is extremely important to us. Although we are on the Fulham Road, it is not an ultra-busy main road, but it is in an excellent position for the exhibition markets, with Earls Court and Olympia just 10 minutes' walk away. We are very close to Kensington and Chelsea for shopping - very important for travellers from Hong Kong and Japan - 20 minutes by car to Heathrow Airport, and 20 minutes by Tube into the West End. In addition, we have underground car parking for 250 cars, a major bonus for a London hotel."

One-stop destination

Once the redevelopment of Chelsea Village is complete, the hotel will be marketed as a one-stop sport and leisure destination, where guests will be able to come for the weekend and have enough to entertain them without leaving the site.

While the proximity of Chelsea FC has been a major draw for some markets, it has not even been mentioned to others. For instance, a Norwegian sports tour operator has booked 50% of bedrooms for all match days for the rest of the season, whereas US business travel agents have little interest in the football facilities.

"We have already signed up 38 out of the top 100 British companies, something that has been undoubtedly helped by the fact that many of the directors of these companies are Chelsea nuts," says Murray.

This does not mean, in any sense, that Chelsea Village Hotel is a themed football hotel. The only area of the operation where the hotel's link to the football club is obvious is at The Shed, the sports bar which has an optimum capacity of 400.

But even this is not a Chelsea-dominated area. While five large television screens relay live coverage of all Chelsea's games, and a collection of signed photographs featuring Chelsea players past and present adorn the walls, other major sporting events are also screened, and memorabilia from all walks of the sporting world are on display.

Murray is keen to point out that The Shed will not be a "yob" bar. "It is much smarter than the typical cheap-and-cheerful, sports-themed restaurant," he says. "It has a clubby feel to it, and we expect it to be used by a lot of Chelsea executive club members."

While the 26 match days each year will potentially be the largest revenue earners for the restaurants and hotel, Murray says that, from the outset, security will prevent entry by any badly behaved elements among the football fraternity. "There is a dress code of collar and tie in certain areas," says Murray, "such as the King's Brasserie and the Bridge Bar."

Undoubtedly, the draw for many potential customers and clients will be the association with Chelsea FC, particularly with the resurgence in recent years of the club's playing form. Its success in the FA Cup last year and its continuing inspiring performance in the FA Premier League this season provide an irresistibly sexy selling point.

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