Sales: Virgin West Coast tickets from £4, £30-£150 off Qatar flights and, erm, easyHotel deals

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• Nathan says:

  3 Mar3 March 06:09

  Need another sub £1000 business class sale on Qatar or RJ. Currently in Thailand after flying from ARN to BKK which hands down beats BA club world by miles.
  If it wasn’t for HFP I wouldn’t have known about the sale etc so thanks Rob! Also now 500ish TP away from Gold….

  • Rob says:

    3 Mar3 March 07:37

    Finnair has an Asia sale out of London for £1200ish.

  • Mariana says:

    4 Mar4 March 23:09

    Same, except I flew to BKK from OSL. Wonderful experience and service all around.

• pauldb says:

  3 Mar3 March 06:44

  I met the easyHotel management a couple of years ago. They felt their real estate advantage was that they didn’t need to offer windows in all rooms, so they can convert more traditional office space. Beyind that, you can’t compete on price with cheap B&Bs/Airbnb if you have to pay OTA commissions, so you need a brand that people come direct to: seem a fair point/position but they haven’t good there yey – they ride on the back of people googling “easyjet hotels”.

  • Rob says:

    3 Mar3 March 07:36

    The one in Kensington, though, is a traditional Victorian townhouse conversion. As you can now convert office space to housing without ‘change of use’ planning permission, the flow of available sites will be lower.

    Ryanair works because they buy brand new planes which have the double benefit of being cheap to run and look good to the customer. A cheap hotel conversion looks, well, cheap.

    I hugely admire Premier Inn – the quality of the new ones is fantastic.

    • James says:

      3 Mar3 March 08:21

      Tis true, there is a new one here in Wigan and its the nicest hotel in town!

      • pauldb says:

        3 Mar3 March 09:02

        Tripadvisor has Premier Inns at the no 1,2 and 3 hotels in Wigan. 🙂

        • Sandgrounder says:

          3 Mar3 March 10:17

          The Wetherspoons Lodge takes some beating in Wigan in my opinion.

    • Calton says:

      3 Mar3 March 12:09

      Easyhotel are profitable, have decent margins, have high occupancy rates and have been around for 12 years.

      It seems to me that you’re just projecting your personal upmarket tastes onto the budget market and don’t fully understand it. No one flies Ryanair because of the new planes, they fly them because of price. Their planes also do look cheap – have you ever been on one? Even though they’ve been toning it down, it’s still a garish yellow inside with advertising boards on the overhead bins. The seats don’t recline and you don’t even get a seat back pocket.

      While it’s a big deal for you, I can assure you people on a small budget (Easyhotel’s target market) aren’t overly concerned about something “looking cheap”!

      • Rob says:

        3 Mar3 March 12:54

        12 years and 10 UK hotels does not reek of success to me.

        ‘Profitable’ and ‘margin’ are odd words in this context. As easyHotel has no costs – the franchises pay upfront fees and ongoing revenue cuts – it is difficult for it to make a loss. What are there total room numbers in the UK? 1600 globally so probably 1000 in the UK. The new Accor budget hotel in the Trocadero will have 600 rooms on its own.

        The Glasgow hotel went bust in 2013, note, and was bailed out personally by Stelios who then reopened it.

        Premier Inn has 700 UK hotels and 50,000 rooms.

        What I would say for easyHotel is that it probably mops up a lot of traffic which would otherwise end up in the fire trap one-star hotels of Earls Court and Victoria and we should be grateful for that. Back in the day I may well have stayed in one myself – I stayed in far worse places than an easyHotel when I was a kid, the low point potentially being a rooms which turned out to be a mattress on the floor in a room above a strip club in Paris.

        • Callum says:

          3 Mar3 March 13:48

          It’s profitable, in business and expanding – that’s a success. It seems rather flippant to say otherwise!

          Of course they have costs… It’s not just a franchise model, they own some of their own hotels. Why you’re comparing them to Accor or Premier Inn I have no idea. There is a rather large middle ground between, “never works” and “global mega-chain”!

        • Rob says:

          3 Mar3 March 15:44

          I compare it to Premier Inn because easyJet is the Premier Inn of the airline business, and Premier Inn is the hotel business that Stelios should have launched! That would have made him a proper 2nd (technically 3rd) fortune.

        • Callum says:

          3 Mar3 March 17:28

          But Premier Inn already existed. I don’t buy the suggestion that the Easy Group could have opened up a replica chain to Premier Inn and definitely beat Whitbread in their own area of expertise. I’m not sure it’s a particularly good comparison either – the Easy Group branding is cheap and tacky looking and they often occupy the bottom rung of the market (EasyBus, EasyGym, EasyFoodStore). Premier Inn is a budget chain, but they don’t seek to come across as one in presentation.

          I agree if it worked then they would currently be much more successful, but I’m fairly sure that a multi-million pound venture would have done a bit of market research into where they should operate in the sector before they started!

• Chris Jones says:

  3 Mar3 March 06:49

  Off subject here.

  With the loss off Accor platinum (Amex) I noticed that I currently need 10 stays or1400 points from status. Has anybody attempted to transfer points?

  • harry says:

    3 Mar3 March 07:16

    You would need to earn the points. 1000 points with a Europcar rental, any good?

  • Rob says:

    3 Mar3 March 07:31

    Finnair is the only way to do this – I think it is 7:1 off top of my head. Finnair is an Amex MR partner.

    • harry says:

      3 Mar3 March 08:33

      How’s your Finnish 🙂 ? https://www.finnair.com/fi/fi/finnair-plus/earn-points/flying

      Looks like you can credit a BA flight to Finnair —> Accor @ 7:1

• Simon says:

  3 Mar3 March 09:04

  The virgin trains deal is fantastic value, I’ve managed to get some tickets for some travel around Easter and some tickets for when I return back from a football match. Saved me hundreds of pounds!

• Talay says:

  3 Mar3 March 09:24

  Way back in the day, the difference between Ryanair and easyJet was that Ryanair bought cheap old planes which were expensive to run and maintain and easyJet bought new expensive planes which were cheaper to run and fix. Stelios is on record saying that if either Ryanair or easyJet had a crash, it would be the end of the (then) fledgling no frills flight sector. Of course, now more established, Ryanair has upgraded their metal.

  To easyHotel. I have stayed in the Victoria one when my regular cheap overnighter was unavailable and it was adequate. if you have been / lived in Japan you will surely be familiar with the modular bathrooms they have in salaryman hotels etc. Same with easyHotel.

  I also enquired about their business model and franchising. To be honest, it was pretty poor and totally reliant upon the third party owning the property and essentially it being a low rent run down building which could benefit from increased occupancy at the expense of more smaller rooms and brand recognition.

  I hugely admire Premier Inn except when the pricing works against me and I feel they are too expensive but day in day out, they deliver fair value and as mentioned above, the new ones are truly good hotels.

  By contrast, the easyHotel model seems to be going nowhere and should perhaps be retired.

• Kathy says:

  3 Mar3 March 10:26

  I stayed in the Old Street Easyhotel in Janaury for a couple of nights, purely because of the location and price. The room literally just has a bed, a bathroom module, and some hooks on the wall. If you want wifi you obviously have to pay for it. I did get a window, though.

  The guests seemed to be mainly youngsters backpacking, so there was some late-night noise. The bed was perfectly acceptable, but if you’re going to be spending any time in the room at all it’s pretty grim. I’ve been in way more appealing youth hostels.

• Smid says:

  3 Mar3 March 10:57

  Hmmmn, seems as if the Virgin sale does not allow two together railcards to be applied to the sale price… Weird, it was doing it last sale at christmas time…

• Andrew H says:

  3 Mar3 March 14:11

  Off topic – just received an email from BA advertising Avios purchase bonus.

  “Be rewarded when you treat yourself, or somebody else. Enjoy up to 30% bonus Avios when you purchase or gift Avios between now and 17 March, so you can reach that reward flight or upgrade and be on the beach even sooner.

  Here’s how much you could earn
  10% bonus when you purchase or gift 1,000 — 15,000 Avios
  20% bonus when you purchase or gift 16,000 — 34,000 Avios
  30% bonus when you purchase or gift 35,000 Avios”

  • harry says:

    3 Mar3 March 18:08

    £575 for 35,000 + 10,500 Bonus = 1.26373p each

    Glad I got 50,000 for ISTR under 0.7p each on the Groupon deal 🙂

    • Genghis says:

      3 Mar3 March 20:40

      Exactly. Not such a great deal. I’m not a buyer at that price

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