Bass has acquired the entire business of Posthouse from Compass Group for £810 million ($1.18 billion) in cash.
Posthouse consists of 79 mid-scale hotels with 12,300 rooms. Of these, 77 hotels are owned freehold or are held on long leases and two are management contracts. In addition, one new hotel will open in Oxford later this year. Seventy eight of the hotels are in the UK and one is in Ireland. Many of the hotels have excellent locations at key motorway and other major road junctions, in city centres and at airports with a particularly strong network in the south east. Bass will be able to add considerable value to the majority of these properties by upgrading them to its international Holiday Inn brand. This will enable them to benefit from the brand recognition, global reservation system and sales force of Holiday Inn. As a result of this, Bass anticipates substantial outperformance in revenue per available room.