CEO of Tune Hotels reveals growth plans.

Tune Hotels has ambitious growth plans - but not as aggressive as you might imagine

London Hotels Insight met the CEO of Tune Hotels, Mr Mark Lankester, a few days ago at the company’s new Westminster hotel.  We managed to get hold of some exclusive information on the company’s growth plans.

The first of the Malaysia-based company’s London hotels is experiencing almost 100% occupancy so far and getting good early reviews.  Although it’s still early days, the hotel is currently 7th out of 299 “specialty lodging” providers in London on TripAdvisor and receiving fairly solid feedback.

It’s particularly interesting that the company’s limited service concept – a la Ryanair – is being embraced by consumers who don’t mind paying for extras as long as these are listed in a transparent manner.

So I asked him about his plans for further roll-out of the Tune Hotels brand – both in the UK and worldwide as well as in London specifically.  His answer surprised me in terms of its restraint and modesty.

While the likes of Premier Inn and Travelodge in the budget sector as well as a host of others aggressively open new London hotels predicated on “the London 2012 effect”, Mr Lankester was refreshingly sanguine.

He told me that he felt that the 2012 Olympics was not in itself the basis of a sustainable business model and I totally agree with him.  After all, how can a single event (albeit a pretty big one) lasting just a few weeks, form the basis of so much hype about new hotel openings?

Tune Hotel Westminster provides space-challenged rooms but they're impeccably clean and perfectly adequate as "crash pads"

So here is the Tune Hotels rollout plan, direct from the source:

• A target of 1500 hotel rooms in London by 2017.
• Next London hotel (probably in Liverpool Street area – but still to be confirmed) to open by the first quarter of 2012.
• Opportunities to be sought in other parts of the UK as they arise.
• Other global opportunities include Turkey, Austria and Russia.

In my view, this represents a very measured and achievable growth plan.

In fact, Mr Lankester told me that the first priority for Tune Hotels was to get good guest feedback about the two core aspects of their proposition: impeccable cleanliness and good (indeed “5 star”) beds.

We’ll be blogging more on these and other aspects of Tune Hotels in future.  But in the meantime, you can brace yourself for a “steady and consistent” flow of new Tune Hotels in the UK and elsewhere.

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Photo credits: Tune Hotels.

Tagged as: Tune Hotel Westminster, Tune Hotels