Activities

Alias Hotels is a chain of city-centre boutique hotels designed to offer style at affordable prices. It was created by the founders of Luxury Family Hotels (a collection of four-star child-friendly properties in rural settings) to target the young business traveller niche.

To kick-start their expansion plans, the Alias management formed a joint venture in 2004 with GuestInvest, a UK pioneer of the concept of buy-to-let hotel rooms aimed at the small investor. However, the group pulled out of the venture a year later and put its portfolio on the market.

The Alias founders, who continue as board directors at Luxury Family Hotels, also moved into the overseas resort and holiday tour business in 2004 when they founded Four Winds Resorts and bought French ski chalet operator Meriski.

Timeline

• 1999: Nicholas Dickinson and Nigel Chapman, who co-founded Luxury Family Hotels (LFH) in 1989, set up Alias Hotels to run a chain of boutique town house hotels. Alias’s first property is the Savoy hotel in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which the partners buy in April. They establish Luxury Hotel Management as the parent company for both Alias and LFH.
• 2000: The Savoy in Cheltenham reopens in March as the Hotel Kandinsky. In July, Alias reveals that it has bought a site for £2.5m in Manchester’s Piccadilly area. The group’s second property, Hotel Barcelona, opens in Exeter in December.
• 2001: The group buys a site in Liverpool on which it plans to build a new hotel, possibly called Alias Ropewalks.
• October 2002: The group announces plans to open a new hotel in Brighton on a site at a new marina complex that was originally built as an Express by Holiday Inn. In October, it opens the Rossetti hotel in Manchester.
• 2003: The Hotel Seattle opens at the new Waterfront complex in Brighton in February. It is the first hotel where Alias does not own the freehold and is held on a 35-year lease from property firm Parkridge Developments. LFH is spun off from LHM as the directors focus on expanding the Alias brand.
• October 2004: Alias Hotels is sold for £30.4m to a joint venture between the Alias management team and GuestInvest, the group that pioneered the UK’s first scheme to sell individual hotel rooms to investors who can stay in their rooms and let them out for a profit the rest of the time. The sale proceeds go to shareholders in LHM, which is then wound down.
• September 2005:  LHM buys out the GuestInvest contract to sell Alias hotel bedrooms and puts the Alias group on the market.
• March 2006: Alias reveals that it is in talks with a "substantial potential acquirer" who iscommitted to the continued development of the Alias brand.
• May 2006: The group sells the 60-bedroom Rosetti hotel in Manchester to Andrew Brownsword's fledgling boutique group Abode for an undisclosed sum. The property did not fit Alias' core proposition.
  

Operating data

Number of hotels: four
Hotel Kandinsky, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (48 bedrooms)
Hotel Barcelona Exeter, Dorset (46 bedrooms),
Hotel Seattle, Brighton (71 bedrooms)  
Rossetti hotel Manchester (61 bedrooms)

Number of employees: between 300 and 400

Sales in the first five months of 2004 grew by more than 30% to £4.2m, while operating profit soared by 56% to £582,000  

Strategy

The company aims to operate 15 Alias hotels by 2010.

Source: Alias Hotels

Key directors

Co-founders: Nicholas Dickinson, Nigel Chapman
Managing director: David Myers
Finance director: Rob Little
Head of marketing: Anne Allin

Contact

103 Farendell Road
Emerald Park
Bristol
South West
BS16 7FF

Tel: 0117 957 6800
Fax: 0117 957 4700

E-mail: info@aliashotels.com
Website: http://www.aliashotels.com

Commentary

When Alias Hotels was sold to a joint venture between its management and GuestInvest in late 2004, it had not opened a new hotel for two years. The problem, said Dickinson, was not lack of opportunity but lack of funding. Smaller companies were barred from the traditional money-raising route of sale-and-leaseback because big investors were not interested in individual properties.

So he has turned to an alternative source of funds that was pioneered in the UK by property entrepreneur Johnny Sandelson’s GuestInvest, which opened its first hotel in London’s Notting Hill Gate in March 2004.

The timeshare-style scheme allows small investors to buy individual hotel bedrooms which they can stay in for a nominal fee of £10 a day and which the hotel operator lets out the rest of the time. Investors benefit from 50% of the revenue, an annual return on their investment of 5% to 7%, and numerous tax breaks.

Alias currently has the new-build Alias Ropewalks in Liverpool in the pipeline, and is looking at sites in London and elsewhere. Short-term, Dickinson wants 15 hotels under the Alias belt by 2010. Longer-term, he has ambitions to operate up to 80 Alias hotels in the UK, when he will then set his sights on Europe.

An update on the buy-to-let scheme was expected in September 2005. Instead, the group announced that LHM had bought out the GuestInvest contract and put the group on the market in search of a new partner.