Register to get 3 free articles
Register to unlock the article and receive our free newsletter. Join 26,000 other hotel leaders and stay in the know.
Want unlimited access? View Plans
Already have an account? Sign in
Independent hotel group, Macdonald Hotels, has announced that it has achieved a profit of £4m in the last financial year and has reduced net core debt to a 14-year low.
The group, which has 53 hotels and resorts in the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, published its annual results for the year to 30 March 2017.
The results showed that the group’s like-for-like turnover was up by 5% to £7.8m and its operating profit was up 8% to £3.2m.
The group’s profit before tax was reported as £5.6m whereas its bank net core debt was reduced to £184m, which was aided by the sale of the Macdonald Swan’s Nest Hotel in Stratford in May 2016 following the previous year’s sales of the Macdonald Old England Hotel and the Macdonald Marine Hotel.
The loss of trade from those three hotels has reduced overall group turnover by £8m to £154.2m and operating profits by £3m compared with 2015/16.
It closed its financial year with net assets of £98m.
The group also hopes to use the cash from upcoming deals to help it to achieve four red star and five-star status at more than 20 of its hotels.
During the year, the group generated £15.3m operating cash flow after interest and invested £8m in its properties, including refurbishments of 150 bedrooms at the Macdonald Randolph Hotel in Oxford, 42 bedrooms at the Macdonald Houstoun House Hotel in Uphall and the remaining 65 bedrooms at the Macdonald Holyrood Hotel in Edinburgh.
In the current trading year, Macdonald Hotel Group has invested £3m in its assets in the year to date with another £10m in the pipeline.
Gordon Fraser, deputy chairman and group managing director said: “Our best-performing hotels are those where we have committed significant investment, underlining that the key to our future growth is continued investment in our estate and in our people, and we’ve made a series of senior appointments which significantly strengthen our management team.
“These key, strategic appointments put us in a great position to capitalise on the major opportunities ahead of us, such as the fact that most of our hotels have significant scope for future hotel development and also for residential development.”
