Activities
English Lakes Hotels is a family-run group of individually styled three- and four-star hotels in and around the Lake District. They cater for both the tourist and the conference markets. The company owns all the hotels bar one, which it manages for a third party.
Timeline
- 1950s: Norman Buckley, great uncle of current chairman Simon Berry, buys Low Wood hotel in 1952, followed by The Famous Wild Boar in 1959.
- 1969: The Royal hotel at Bowness on Windermere joins the portfolio.
- 1970s: Buckley dies in 1974 and his nephew, Michael Berry, takes over as managing director. The Waterhead hotel is bought in July 1975 and English Lakes Hotels Ltd is established in May 1979.
- 1991: The Lancaster House hotel is built on a greenfield site and opens in June.
- 1998: Simon Berry takes on the role of managing director from his father, Michael, who remains as executive chairman until his death in June 2004, when Simon assumes the chairmanship too.
- 2003: In April, the group signs its first management deal, a 10-year contract to run the Storrs Hall hotel in Windermere.
- 2004: The Waterhead reopens in April after a £3m conversion into a four-star town house hotel. The 29-bedroom Royal is sold and ceases trading in September.
Operating data
Number of hotels: five
Number of employees: about 350
Group turnover for the year ending 31 March 2004: £11.8m
Payroll as a percentage of turnover: 34.8%
The hotels:
Low Wood: 110 bedrooms, two restaurants, leisure club, beauty salon and watersports centre.
Lancaster House: 80 bedrooms and one restaurant.
The Famous Wild Boar: 36 bedrooms and one restaurant.
The Waterhead: 28 bedrooms, one restaurant and bar & bistro.
The Royal: 29 bedrooms, one restaurant and two theme bars.
Storrs Hall: 28 bedrooms and one restaurant.
Strategy
The company plans to expand to 10 hotels over the next two years. These will be good-quality hotels, primarily in the Lake District, and could be a mixture of management deals and owned hotels.
Source: Simon Berry, Caterer & Hotelkeeper, 24 April 2003
Key directors
Chairman and managing director: Simon Berry
Buildings and leisure director: Tim Berry
Operations director: Douglas Dale
Sales director: Jane Knowles
Finance director: Mike Doyle
Low Wood
Windermere
Cumbria
LA23 1LP
Tel: +44 (0)15394 33773
Fax: +44 (0)15394 34275
E-mail: info@elh.co.uk
Website: http://www.elh.co.uk
English Lakes Hotels has been a leading player in the Lakeland hotel community for many decades. Michael Berry was awarded an OBE in 1997 for his services to training and tourism in Cumbria and, three years later, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Cumbrian branch of the HCIMA.
The company’s plans to double in size, announced in 2003, have yet to be realised. Rather, the company has shrunk slightly, with the closure of the Royal hotel in late 2004 because it did not fit the company profile.
It will be a challenge for ELH to find suitable sites in a tourist hotspot, where demand for hotels is high and management contracts are unusual. It has now said that it would consider leaseholds as well as outright buys and management deals. Its acquisition criteria are specific – it wants high-quality three- and four-star hotels with water frontage that lie within a 10-mile radius of its Windermere base.
Meanwhile, the group continues to invest in upgrading its existing estate. The 29-bedroom, two-star Waterhead hotel closed in November 2003 and re-emerged the following April as the area’s first four-star town house hotel, with 41 bedrooms.
ELH is currently adding 19 luxury suites to Lancaster House, along with new conference and function facilities and an improved leisure and beauty centre, that will be complete by March 2005.
