Whitbread PLC today reports its trading performance to 1 December 2016, revealing total sales growth of 8.6% for the third quarter.
Alison Brittain, Chief Executive of Whitbread, commented, “We continue to make good progress against our three point strategic plan: to grow and innovate in our core UK businesses; to focus on our strengths to grow internationally; and to build the capability and platform to support future growth.
'We remain on track to open c.3,700 new UK Premier Inn rooms and our committed pipeline stands at around 14,000 UK hotel rooms.'
The firm has also recently signed two additional sites in Germany (Freiburg and Essen) taking our committed German pipeline to five hotels.
Whitbread expects to open 230-250 net new Costa coffee shops worldwide and to install at least 1,500 new Costa Express machines, having already surpassed its previous guidance of 1,250 in the current financial year.
In the quarter, the firm's brands continued to win market share growing total sales by 8.6% and like-for-like sales by 1.7%. Trading since the end of the quarter is such that Whitbread expects to deliver full year results in line with expectations.
Premier Inn grew total sales in the quarter by 9.2%. Whitbread opened 15 hotels in the UK since the start of the year, increasing the number of rooms available by 9.7%, whilst maintaining occupancy at a high level of 84.5%. Like-for-like sales grew by 1.8% benefitting from the firm's hotel extension programme which, as expected, diluted the like-for-like RevPAR, which was down 1.3%.
In the quarter, Costa delivered total sales growth of 12.5% and like-for-like sales growth of 4.3%. This performance was supported by its new advertising and promotional campaigns and benefitted from the timing of the quarter end, which included a strong start to the Christmas period. For the comparable period, to 26 November, excluding this timing benefit, Costa’s like for like sales growth was 2.9%*3.
Brittain concluded, 'Our property strategy is to carry out a modest number of sale and lease back transactions in order to recycle capital into strong returning new growth opportunities and we successfully completed two such transactions in December.
'We now expect total sale proceeds for the year to be in the region of £200 million. These transactions highlight the strong asset backing to our balance sheet and are evidence of how we optimise our significant property portfolio.”