The UK hotel and pub group Whitbread has announced plans to raise £800m (€1.15bn) by selling off half its Marriott hotels
The move will see the company sell Marriott and Courtyard by Marriott hotels in the UK overt the next three years and operate them under management contracts.
It will also sell its one hotel, a country club outside Hamburg and restaurant chain in Germany.
Surplus money raised by the sale is expected to go to shareholders.
The plans were announced by chief executive Alan Parker who said: “We have strong brands but our overall return on capital is not yet good enough.”
He added that major re-structure is not required but the company would have a new approach to growth and a greater focus on return on capital.
One of the main points of focus will be on the group's Premier Travel Inn chain of budget hotels. Last July, Whitbread bought 132
Premier Lodge hotels with a further nine in the pipeline from the Spirit Group for £505m (€725.3m).
These were merged with Whitbread's own budget chain, Travel Inn to form a new brand Premier Travel Inn which the company now plans to grow at the rate of an extra 1,500 rooms a year to 35,000 by 2008.
It is already Britain's biggest budget chain, a fast growing area of the UK hotel landscape, with 29,141 rooms in 461 locations.