Whitbread's Costa Coffee enjoys a surge in sales as it gets the nod of approval from discerning Parisian coffee lovers
Whitbread said Costa Coffee was winning over famously hard-to-please Parisian caffeine lovers, as it reported surging sales.
The FTSE100 firm – which also owns Premier Inn hotels and restaurants chains including Beefeater – said total sales rose 13.2 per cent in the 50 weeks to February 13, or 4 per cent stripping out new stores.
Boss Andy Harrison hailed a better Christmas in 2013, while some 92,000 people also ate their Christmas dinner in Whitbread’s restaurants.
Seal of approval: The French say Oui to Costa Coffee's brand of coffee and help boost sales
And he set a bullish tone on the firm’s drive to export Premier Inn and Costa around the world.
Whitbread has opened Costa Coffees in Paris, in an experiment with French tastebuds.
‘It’s early days but we’re really quite encouraged by what we’ve seen,’ said Harrison.
The group is also aiming to open 100 new Costas in China every year, as a burgeoning middle-class turns to coffee as well as tea for a morning pick-me-up.
Costa’s sales were up 20.1 per cent to £1.15billion including the expansion during 2013, or 5.8 per cent when the effect of new shops is excluded.
Premier Inn saw total sales rise 13.3 per cent, or 4.7 per cent on an underlying basis, while the restaurant division posted more modest underlying growth of 1.3 per cent.
Whitbread plans to have 75,000 hotel rooms by 2018, compared to 54,000 in the UK, with most of the growth set to come from London.
The company has also launched ‘hub by Premier Inn’, city centre hotels with smaller and cheaper rooms, to appeal to business travellers and tourists alike.
Harrison said he did not believe that economic revival would erode Premier Inn’s customer base, as businesses and tourists opt to return to more upmarket hotels.
‘We’re working hard to improve the quality of the room,’ he said. One improvement is a new mattress with 1,200 springs, ‘25 per cent more than Travelodge’s new mattress’.
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