MIDAS SHARE TIPS: Premier Inn owner’s got plenty of room for growth

Unhealthy, unwholesome and positively dangerous. That was how many 19th Century doctors viewed the use of double beds for couples, married or not. Ideas had changed dramatically by the 1950s and sleeping apart was considered a sign of marital failure. 

Now, one in six UK couples admit to sleeping separately, often blaming wriggling and restless partners for their decision. Practically minded Germans pursue a different path, sharing a bed but not a duvet.

Premier Inn owner Whitbread moved into Germany in 2014. Today, there are 59 hotels and the business is growing fast. Hotels are similar in most respects to their UK counterparts, but there is an important difference. Each double room includes two single duvets, one for each guest – because that’s how Germans like to sleep.

Whitbread shares are £28.97 and should increase materially in price over the next five years. Long associated with beer, the company’s roots stretch back to the mid-18th Century, when Samuel Whitbread set up the UK’s first mass-production brewery on Chiswell Street in London. 

By the 1970s, Whitbread was moving into pubs and restaurants, including well-known chains Beefeater and Brewers Fayre. Within a few years however, some clever soul had twigged that restaurants with capacious car parks could easily fit a hotel on site.

Hotels turned out to be far more profitable than pubs and restaurants, and today Whitbread is the UK’s largest budget hotel business with 850 premises from Elgin in northern Scotland to Helston on the western tip of Cornwall. Brewing has gone, many restaurants have gone and so has Costa Coffee, acquired as a family business in 1995 but sold to Coca-Cola for almost £4 billion in 2018.

Beefeater or Brewers Fayre venues can still be found next to around half the hotels but that too is changing under an ambitious growth plan unveiled by head honcho Dominic Paul earlier this year.

Chief executive of Costa Coffee from 2016, Paul left the business after the Coke deal, spent some time at Domino’s Pizza and returned to head Whitbread in 2023. His absence from the group coincided with the pandemic, which left hotels on their knees and saw Whitbread shares slump to £21.

Even in the worst of times, however, Whitbread retained an edge over competitors, many of which have been forced to close down or retrench in recent years.

That puts Paul in an enviable position. Supply has dwindled, demand has risen and few operators have the financial muscle to benefit. Paul is determined to seize the day, with a plan to expand the UK portfolio from around 86,000 to 100,000 rooms by 2030 and double the German estate to 20,000 rooms, becoming the number one operator there within five years.

Progress is already underway. In Britain, more than 100 Beefeaters and Brewers Fayre will be converted into 3,500 new rooms, while another 125 will be replaced with more modern restaurants incorporated into the hotels. The trend is tried and tested at hundreds of Premier Inns and most customers seem to like it.

Restaurant conversions will be supplemented by an aggressive opening programme here and in Germany. Many new sites are already in the pipeline, others are under discussion and Paul is extremely confident of achieving his 2030 target.

Digital upgrades will bolster revenues too, from offering rooms with a view online, for a little bit of extra cash, to early check-ins and late check-outs, also for a few pounds more. An efficiency drive is part of Paul’s plans and, at interim results, last month, he said the group expected to increase profits from around £500 million to at least £800 million by 2030 and generate more than £2 billion for dividends and share buy-backs, a process which tends to increase investor returns over time.

Whitbread owns around half its estate outright, leasing the rest from property groups. This makes the group more financially robust than most rivals and imbues a sense of trust among investors and landlords. Consumers trust Whitbread brands too, particularly Premier Inn, with its promise of comfortable bedding, powerful showers, spic-and-span rooms and all-you-can-eat breakfasts.

Rachel Reeves’ ill-thought-out move to raise employers’ National Insurance contributions is unhelpful for Whitbread and Paul has made his feelings known to the Chancellor. But brokers still expect sales and profits to increase at a decent clip over the next three years and have pencilled in a 5 per cent dividend increase to £1.02 for this year, rising to nearly £1.07 after that.

Midas verdict: Whitbread revenues are 50 per cent higher than they were in 2019, profits are 20 per cent ahead and boss Dominic Paul is determined to increase momentum from here. But Whitbread shares still languish below pre-pandemic levels and have fallen since Rachel Reeves’ Budget. They should recover from here. Buy at £28.97 and hold.

Traded on: Main market Ticker: WTB Contact: whitbread.co.uk

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