Planning Permission Granted For 60-room Hotel at Warwick Castle
Main Photo: Warwick Castle, whose roots go back to William the Conquerer, 1068!
Date: May 2022
Name: Warwick Castle – plans to open late 2023
Location: Warwick, 20 minutes drive North-East of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK
Number of Keys: 60
Owner: Merlin Entertainments, who have managed the Castle since 2007 on behalf of Secure Income REIT plc, no stranger to hotels at attraction venues, such as Alton Towers. Merlin, then owned by Blackstone, sold the Castle to Nick Leslau’s investment vehicle, Prestbury and a sale and leaseback for 35 years in 2007. Together with Alton Towers this changed hands for £622m.
Manager: We assume in-house….they operate 130 attractions, 20 hotels and 6 holiday villages in 25 countries, across 4 continents
Plans to add a new hotel on the site of Warwick Castle have been approved by Warwick District Council. Earlier this year, the owners of Warwick Castle submitted a planning application to build a new hotel at the famous tourist site.
The proposal included plans for a 60-room hotel on the site of what is currently a car park. There are also plans to create a new play area and extend the restaurant, which is owned (managed?) by the Merlin Group.
A review of the plans, submitted to Warwick District Council, took place on Wednesday 4 May 2022 when the project was approved.
Merlin says building the hotel will be good for the area and attract more visitors to the town. It says the new structure will be sensitively designed and that it will replace the lost car parking spaces by establishing new ones in an adjacent field. The company also promised to plant more than 1,000 new trees around the site.
Warwick District Council said the proposal was “positive for the future of the Castle and the town.”
Merlin said the idea of building a hotel was first raised in a master plan the company drew up in 2019 and that the site it intended to use was currently a floodlit, asphalt car park.
Work on the hotel is slated to start at the end of the year and the hotel is scheduled to open before Christmas 2023.
The attraction introduced “Knights Village” lodges within its grounds in 2016 to allow people to stay overnight. It also offers glamping tents to visitors, as well as live entertainment including jousting.
A consortium including private equity giant Blackstone, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) and KIRKBI, an investment vehicle controlled by the founding family of the Lego brand, acquired Merlin Entertainments for around $7.5bn in 2019.
The deal, which took Merlin off the stock market, was one of the biggest European private equity deals in recent years.
In 2005, Blackstone paid $105m to acquire the company, with KIRKBI also taking a 30 percent stake in the firm.
The company launched a $5.6bn IPO in 2013 which saw Blackstone’s stake in the company valued at over $1bn. Today, Merlin is the second largest family entertainment company in the world with over 130 attractions, globally.
Price: Undisclosed
THPT Comment: Well Merlin have certainly seen stupendous growth since 1998 when Nick Varney and Andrew Carter did a management buyout of Vardon plc to form Merlin, with Blackstone and KIRKBI in and out as investors…and Mr Leslau recently divested himself of some 125 Travelodge hotels…dizzy at their heights!
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