Hotel News Now each week features a news roundup from a different region of the world. This week’s compilation covers Europe.

French hotel company Accor set a personal record for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the first half of the year. The global hotel brand’s EBITDA was €504 million ($547 million) in the first six months of 2024, writes Hotel News Now’s Terence Baker.

CEO Sébastien Bazin told analysts at an earnings call that Accor has “never done that before, half a billion-plus for six months. We feel confident, we feel strong, and we are able to control the controllables. Wherever we see demand, we are there. Yes, there are challenges, but we are confident.”

The Virgin London-Shoreditch is an important milestone for both Virgin Hotels and its parent Virgin Group, a return to the city in which Richard Branson started his entrepreneurship in the early 1970s, said CEO James Bermingham.

Virgin Hotels, one of the hospitality division wholly owned by Virgin Group, is debuting in the parent firm’s spiritual home of London on Aug. 1, with Bermingham telling Hotel News Now the return is exciting and heralds an expansion for the brand that will include Bermingham’s hometown of Dublin, writes Terence Baker.

Berlin-based NUMA Group has agreed to acquire United Kingdom-based lifestyle aparthotel and serviced-apartment brand company Native Places for an undisclosed price. Last year, NUMA acquired another serviced-apartment brand, YAYS, from private equity firm Proprium Capital Partners.

Native Places, a division of Native Holdings, has two brands, The Apartment Collection and Native Aparthotels, and an overall portfolio of approximately 800 rooms in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Manchester. The acquisition increases NUMA’s unit count to more than 7,300 in Europe.

Accor’s Ibis family of brands — Ibis, Ibis Budget and Ibis Styles — turns 50 years old in this year. The actual anniversary is in September, but Accor has already started celebrating the five decades since they were created in 1974 by Accor’s founders Paul Dubrule and Gérard Pélisson, seven years after Accor itself was founded.

Julie White, Accor’s chief commercial officer for premium, midscale and economy brands in Europe and North Africa, said the French hotel company's Ibis trio is rooted in its economy-sector fundamentals. She said, “Ibis has always been geared in it being the first hotel brand in Europe that was economy but had standards that were new and acceptable for any type of traveler. European travelers sought out affordable trips in decades past, and the Ibis brand embraced that type of traveler.”

• Radisson Hotel Group has announced its 232-room Radisson Hotel Graz in Austria’s second-largest city by population, Graz. The hotel’s room count makes it the largest hotel in Graz by that metric.
• Accor has converted its Ibis London Earls Court into a dual-branded hotel. Opened in July, the asset contains an Ibis hotel that retains the original name and has 226 rooms and the Mercure London Earls Court that has 144 rooms but will have by March of next year 282 rooms.
• The independent boutique hotel Ellen Kensington will open in September in the Kensington district of London and feature a pan-Asian restaurant. More than half of its 105 rooms will overlook Barkston Gardens, which was built in the 1880s as part of the Gunter Estate of Georgian homes, one of which was home to Victorian actress Dame Ellen Terry.
  
• London-based hotel operator The Resident will open its first hotel in Scotland, the 164-room Resident Edinburgh on Sept. 1, which will occupy a building that for more than 60 years was a government office for revenue and tax collection. The parent company has four hotels in London and one in Liverpool.
• Barcelona-based owner Grupo Hoteles Gargallo has acquired the 89-room hotel Casa Lit Barcelona from a joint venture created by Geneva-based Stoneweg Hospitality and Boston-based Bain Capital for an undisclosed price.
• German real-estate owner Union Investment via its fund UniInstitutional European Real Estate has completed the acquisition of the 128-room 25hours Hotel Copenhagen Paper Island in the Danish capital. The hotel opened on July 27, and UI first signed an agreement for the property in 2022. KNSA Hospitality Kopenhagen ApS operates the hotel under a 25-year deal. It is the second 25hours hotel in Copenhagen.
• Radisson Hotel Group will open the Radisson Red Birmingham Edgbaston Stadium, in Brimingham, England, in spring 2027. The 146-room hotel will be part of the renovation of Edgbaston Stadium, one of England’s cricket stadiums that hosts international matches, with its first guests likely to be there for the stadium’s hosting of an Ashes fixture, the century-old, fierce rivalry between England and Australia.
• Viceroy will open on Oct. 1 the Viceroy at 76-room Ombria Algarve in Loulé, Portugal. The property also will have 59 residences, six restaurants and an 18-hole golf course.
• Cardo Hotels has opened its second European hotel, to complement its Roman property. The 532 rooms of the Cardo Brussels cover 24 floors, and the hotel has been amalgamated within Marriott International soft brand Autograph Collection.
• Locke has opened its 16th hotel, the 370-room Locke de Santa Joana in Portugal’s capital Lisbon. The property is a renovation of a 17th-century monastery.
• Motel One is to open the 157-room Cloud One Düsseldorf-Kö Bogen on Oct. 1. The Cloud One brand has a hotel in New York City and now four hotels in Europe, three in Germany and one in the Czech Republic.
• Paris-based Extendam and 123 IM, among other owners, have sold three Accor-branded hotels in Germany — 142-room Mercure Hotel Hamm; 146-room Mercure Hotel Hagen, and 170-room Mercure Hotel Ludenscheid — to Extendam’s operating and investment partner SomnOO, which now owns, either with a majority or minority share, 61 hotels in Germany and France.
  
• IHG Hotels & Resorts has signed an agreement with owner Senator Hotels & Resorts to open in spring 2026 the 82-room Hotel Indigo in Jerez de la Frontera in the Spanish home of the variety of fortified wine, sherry.
• Yotel has opened its first European hotel for its YotelPad brand. The 62-room YotelPad London Stratford complements two other hotels for the brand in Miami and Park City, Utah.
• In a turn-key sale by developer Redentum Partners, EasyHotel has acquired a new-build site for a 94-room hotel in Madrid that is due to open in spring 2025.
• French budget-sector firm B&B Hotels has acquired five Pentahotels-branded assets in the United Kingdom from Luxembourg-based Aroundtown SA. The hotels are the 90-room Pentahotel Inverness; 103-room Pentahotel Warrington; 112-room Pentahotel Derby; 126-room Pentahotel Ipswich, and 131-room Pentahotel Birmingham. All are to undergo some degree of refurbishment, and all are currently not operating.
• IHG Hotels & Resorts is making its debut in the Spanish city of Granada — famous for the Moorish palace of the Alhambra — with the 167-room Voco Granada, which is due to open in spring 2026 and is a partnership with owner Senator Hotels & Resorts. It is the second Voco-branded hotel in Spain, the existing property being in Madrid.
• Wyndham Hotels & Resorts has opened its first Dolce-branded hotel in Turkey in partnership with owner DRD Hotels. The 155-room Dolce by Wyndham Çeşme Alaçatı sits on the Algean Sea and increases Wyndham’s Turkey portfolio to almost 120 hotels.

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