Overview
- The Beefeater chain closed all 106 of its UK restaurants on Thursday, September 10, completing a staged wind-down that followed Brewers Fayre closures earlier that week.
- Whitbread says the programme will deliver roughly £250m of savings through a mix of converting some sites into hotel rooms, selling freeholds and conditional disposals to third-party operators.
- The company plans to convert a number of former restaurants into about 600 additional Premier Inn rooms and to sell around £1.5bn of freehold property to help fund expansion to roughly 96,000 rooms by FY2031.
- Whitbread estimates around 3,800 roles are at risk from the closures, with the firm saying it will seek redeployment where possible and that about 900 team members could transfer if a conditional sale of 53 sites to Queensway Inns completes.
- Many closed sites are being marketed as going concerns and some may reopen under new operators or as rebranded value pubs, while local communities and staff face immediate job and service loss as the company pivots to a pure-play hotel model.