Premier Inn

The British Institution was a 19th century organisation formed to exhibit artworks. We are, of course, not remotely interested in that. The phrase ‘A British Institution’, however, has come into popular parlance to mean anything uniquely British that is generally well loved. Anything means anything. Red telephone boxes, fish and chips, primary school nativity plays, Bobbys with boob-shaped helmets and so on. There is no definitive list but if you are British you will understand what they are. I’m about to add something else to this non-existent list: The Premier Inn. Back in 1987 the brewing company Whitbread opened up a hotel next to its Beefeater pub and restaurant in Basildon, Essex. It named it Travel Inn. Over the next few years Travel Inns started popping up all over the country. Unlike traditional hotels, Travel Inn sold rooms at a fixed, low price with breakfast and other meals having to be paid for separately. For around £30 per night you could get a room with a double bed and also a bed settee meaning a family of four could squeeze into one for the same price as single occupancy. Most of these hotels were newly built and situated on the edge of towns and cities and had plenty of parking space. Motels had been popular in North America for decades but it took until the early nineties for the concept to catch on in the UK. Not that Travel Inn was a copy of the American Motel. Like that first one in Basildon they were built next to existing Whitbread pubs or, where necessary, new pubs were built alongside the Travel Inns. These family friendly hostelries, often under the brand name of Brewer’s Fayre, became popular with locals as well as the hotel patrons. Throughout the nineties Travel Inns began to appear in city centres including in London, frequently repurposing existing buildings. The jewel in Travel Inn’s crown was, and possibly still is, the one contained in the old London County Council building next to the London Eye. Fixed room pricing was unsurprisingly abandoned and a room in a London Travel Inn might set you back £100.

In 2004 Whitbread acquired a competing hotel chain, Premier Lodge. Merging the companies, Premier Travel Inn was formed which three years later became Premier Inn. There are now over 800 of them. Apart from a few in the Middle East, Germany and Ireland, all the Premier Inns are in the UK. Whitbread sold its brewing interest in 2001 to concentrate on its hotel and restaurant business and Premier Inn, the largest hotel brand in the UK, makes up 70% of their earnings. The success of Premier Inn did not go unnoticed and rivals sprung up. The largest of those is Travelodge whose first hotel actually predates that first Travel Inn in Basildon. Whilst successful, Travelodge, with 570 locations, has not expanded as much as Premier Inn and it is fair to say has a reputation as a somewhat downmarket hotel chain. Most Brits love the Premier Inn, whether they admit it or not. Not many speak of Travelodge with much affection.

It’s August 2020 and Covid-19 is really taking the piss. Lockdown restrictions may have eased but foreign travel is still nigh on impossible and anyone who fancies a holiday is urged to take a ‘staycation’, whilst constantly being reminded that they are about to die (or kill someone else) if they simply forget to keep their mouth covered with a bit of cloth.

“Let’s go away for a few days, we need a change of scenery.”

“How about a few days in a Premier Inn somewhere?”

“Erm, OK…”

I recently had six nights away from home. Where I went is of no relevance here. Neither is the fact I stayed in three different Premier Inns as, frankly, there was virtually no difference between them. The restaurant in one of them was closed except for breakfast but that is down to a pandemic rather than design and in ‘normal’ times the experience in each of them would have been identical. That is the thing about Premier Inns. You are pretty much know what you are going to get. As most of the visitors to my blog are British it is likely that you will know too. However, for the benefit of those not native to this land and those who are but have been living in isolation for the last thirty years, here goes. First of all, programme your satnav to find the place and park your car in the carpark. This might be free or there might be a slightly annoying charge. Then get used to the colour purple. It is the corporate colours of Premier Inn. It is distinctive without being garish, at least in my opinion. There is likely to be a small reception area and if you are lucky there might be someone manning the desk. Premier Inn employees tend to be friendly but of course I haven’t had the chance to try them all out and test them on their amiability potential. You will have booked online so it’s a simple process of giving them your name and them giving you a key card for your room. In some locations you can use a machine to check yourself in and collect a key card. You are likely to need this to get through corridor doors on the way to your room. That room will likely be very familiar to you, even if you haven’t stayed at that particular Premier Inn before as it is the same as all the others you’ve stayed in. The only real differences are if you’ve chosen a family or accessible room. We will consider the normal double room. Through the door there will be a minimal amount of wardrobe space on one side and the bathroom on the other. Beyond the wardrobe is a worktable and chair. There will be sockets and perhaps USBs along the back of the table for charging your devices, British plugs only. That most British of hotel accessories, the tea tray is sat on the table. Above the table is a telly with a lot of freeview channels. On the other side is the bed. Premier Inn make a big play of their beds being of such quality that a good night’s sleep is guaranteed. That’s a bold claim but they are in my experience usually comfortable. In pre-covid times they even had a pillow menu to help you achieve optimum sleeping potential and even now you can request extra pillows if you wish. At the window end of the room there is an armchair or maybe the settee/pull out bed if you happen to have been billeted in a family room. Back to the bathroom, a bath with a shower over it (some locations have a shower only) and a sink is it. A big and a little towel per occupant is provided. Toiletries are limited to two wall mounted liquid soap dispensers rather than the usual small individual bottles, which saves the planet from plastic waste and no doubt saves Whitbread thousands of pounds. The room has an individual heating control but air conditioning is likely to be limited to opening the window. That is your room for the night or the next few days. It is nothing special yet it is somehow quite a comforting place to return to after a hard day’s doing whatever it is that takes you there in the first place. The wifi is free or you can pay to get a faster connection. I’ve never needed to do that but I guess if you want to watch Netflix on your ipad rather than freeview it might be worth the fee.

The other aspect of hotel staying is the catering. As previously mentioned your Premier Inn will either have an integral bar/restaurant or be next door to a pub which serves the same purpose. It is usual pub grub for dinner though the menus may differ. Breakfast is, however, standard across the range. For £8.99 you can attack the all you can eat buffet breakfast. The Full English (or Scottish, Welsh, Irish) is a British institution in itself and whilst other countries have seen their hotels go down the breakfast buffet line, none do it as well as in Britain. When a British person is away from home it is perfectly natural for him/her to expect to start the day with a huge plate full of highly calorific food as after all, it could be all of four hours until lunch. Whilst a bowl of cornflakes may well suffice at home, an unlimited supply of bacon, sausage, eggs, hash browns, beans, black pudding, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, toast, butter, jam, tea, coffee AND a bowl of cornflakes as an aperitif is the minimum we expect when we are staying in a hotel. At the moment a buffet breakfast is not really ‘covid secure’ so it’s table service but you can still have as much as you dare ask the server for before embarrassing yourself. It’s pretty good value for £8.99, though if there’s a Morrisons across the road, as was the case in one of the places I was staying recently, you might be able to stuff your face with assorted piggy products and the accompaniments for less than that.

That is, in a nutshell, your Premier Inn experience. No need to check out, just drop your key card in the box and bugger off. Compared with other hotels, staying in a Premier Inn may seem a very mediocre experience. That belies the fact that you will (usually) have a comfortable stay for (usually) not a lot of money which thereby allows you to get away more than you would otherwise do. Not to mention the fact it’s better than Travelodge. Whitbread hit the jackpot when they decided to go into the hotel business. I doubt even they realised just how much ‘a couple of nights in a Premier Inn’ would become a British Institution.