Cash boost for Tulip expansion

Hotel franchisor Golden Tulip has received a multimillion-pound boost from Morley Fund Management to help it open a further 15 to 20 hotels in the UK.

The first hotel to open under the deal will be a 108-bedroom Tulip Inn at the North Harbour business park in Portsmouth, Hampshire. The hotel is scheduled to open in October.

Peter Roberts, chief executive of Golden Tulip UK, said money from Morley would be provided on a site-by-site basis but there was no "hard and fast" amount. The group tends to spend an average of £3.6m on its hotels, plus the cost of the land.

He added that the group was currently in negotiations on "a significant number of sites" across the UK and Ireland for both its Tulip Inn and Golden Tulip hotel brands.

Roberts said discussions on sites in Dublin, Belfast, Birmingham, Epsom, Swindon and Brentwood were at the most advanced stage and he hoped to be able to make an announcement about some of those hotels within the next few months.

He added that the group was also in "fairly advanced" discussions on three sites in the capital - in the West End, the City and east London - and hoped to make an announcement about them later this month. Two of the hotels will be Golden Tulips and one a Tulip Inn.

Roberts said the group had decided to launch its ambitious expansion plans now because of the opportunities for sites.

"The good sites won't be around forever," he said, "so we really should be concentrating on our expansion over the next three years."

The majority of the new hotels will be Tulip Inns, with the more upmarket Golden Tulip hotels mainly restricted to city centres.

Golden Tulip UK currently has two hotels in Manchester, one in Glasgow and one in Birmingham. Two more hotels - in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, and Castleford, West Yorkshire - are scheduled to open later this year.