FOXTROTS   

Fox – sly.  Trots – left-leaning (Trotsky) plus its more insalubrious meaning. 

Foxtrots – leading the industry in a dance. 

 

Quinlan. Quintessentially wrong?

Hotel investment activity of Quinlan Private appears to be taking another turn.

At one time the finance company was investing in 5-star hotels, but this year its activity has been in 4-star and budget hotels.   QP owns Four Seasons hotels in Budapest, Dublin, and Prague.

It bought the three London hotels left over from a 4-hotel group after London’s Savoy hotel was bought out by the Fairmont Group.   GP regrouped these three, but instead of naming the leftover three the Claridges Group, it created a new name, Maybourne.

We criticised this choice at the time; two years later the name is still less known than one of the three hotels, Claridges.   Earlier this year QP bought 47 hotels in the UK under Marriott brands for US$2.2bn (£1.1bn). And now it has bought 20 hotels for US$2.3bn (€1.17bn) from the Ireland-based Jurys Doyle group – not JD’s upmarket hotels, but its budget brand, Jurys Inn.

Of these, 14 are in the UK and six in Ireland.   Worse, these Inns will have to be renamed, and thus will lose part of their market value.   

Presumably QP is making moves into the hotel business on financial criteria. If on hotel operating criteria, then it is making mistake after mistake.    

 

The Fox