Whitbread markets 'hub' hotels

Whitbread is introducing a new type of hotel, designed to appeal to price-conscious, tech-savvy travelers who are more interested in location, location, location than spacious rooms.

'Hub' by Premier Inn will feature chic yet smallish (11.4 square metre) rooms in downtown areas, with up-to-the-minute details like lights controlled by mobile app. The rooms were test-marketed in the Premier Inn at King's Cross, with more than 1,800 consumers providing input that helped shape the final design.

'With space at a premium, each aspect of the design has been aimed at optimising every single centimetre of space from the desk that folds up and disappears into the bed to a convenient under the bed space for luggage', explains Whitbread's Patrick Dempsey. Note the control panel at the head of the bed. Not shown in the photo is a flat-screen TV/entertainment centre. These trendy but tiny rooms are about half the size of the average Whitbread hotel room, by the way.

One reason to launch new concepts such as the 'hub' is to achieve Whitbread's goal of operating 75,000 UK hotel rooms by 2018, not to mention higher revenue and profits. The 'hub' hotels will cost less to build and operate than other Whitbread hotels, and room rates will be as much as 30% less than charged by other Premier Inn units.