Hotel chain described as worst in UK makes £20m profit

The Adelphi Hotel

A hotel chain which was recently named the worst in the country has made profits of more than £20m.

The Manchester based Britannia Hotels Group has filed its results for the last 12 months.

According to the firm’s accounts sales for the year ending March 31, 2018, were up four per cent to £96.9m, while pre-tax profits rose from £19m to £20.6m.

Britannia runs hotels in Manchester, Liverpool and Brighton.

The group, which includes the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel and has its headquarters in Hale, was voted the worst UK hotel chain for the sixth consecutive year.

Nearly a quarter of guests making official complaints about poor customer service, shabby rooms and rubbish food, according to a survey by Which? Travel.

Guests gave the chain, which couldn’t muster more than two stars out of five in any category, a pitiful 35% customer score overall.

The terms ‘old’, ‘shabby’ and ‘outdated’ kept coming up time and time again when guests were asked to describe how they found their stay with Britannia Hotels, which also includes the Britannnia and Sachas in Manchester.

One guest went as far as to describe the hotel they stayed in as a “filthy hovel,” while another advised not to bother and to “find somewhere else”.

When Which? visited one location, the Grade II-listed Royal Albion Hotel on Brighton seafront, they found it ‘run down’ and ‘depressingly shabby and neglected’.

Investigators for Which? stayed at Britannia’s Royal Albion hotel in Brighton and found dirty carpets and peeling wallpaper. Which?

Travel editor Rory Boland said: ‘Britannia has superb locations, fabulous buildings but terrible hotels.’

Last June, the company was fined £265,000 for seven breaches of food safety and hygiene regulation at the Adelphi in Liverpool – once the subject of a hit BBC fly-on-the-wall series.

Britannia Hotels – which has bought six more properties, increasing its portfolio to 61 – said its strategy was ‘to offer increasing levels of comfort and service whilst maintaining its highly competitive prices’.

Its most recent acquisition was the 175-bedroom Coylumbridge Hotel in the Scottish Highlands.

The acquisition comes less than a year after the property was acquired by American private investment company Starwood Capital Group, as part of a seven-strong portfolio of Hilton hotels for £135m.

The price tag on the Coylumbridge Hotel at the time was £8.75m.

Alex Langsam, 80, founded the company more than 40 years ago.

One of his first ventures was in Northenden in Manchester.

He has built up an estimated £240m fortune and is thought to live in a ten-bedroom former hotel in Cheshire

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