easyHotel hopes to open 'super budget' hotel in Cambridge's Newmarket Road - with rooms from £19.99 a night

Company signs 25-year lease on site in same road as Travelodge and Premier Inn

Hotel wars could be about to break out on Newmarket Road in Cambridge as easyHotel, the owner, developer and operator of ‘super budget’ branded hotels, signed a 25-year lease on a site there.

The agreement is subject to planning permission and easyHotels has so far been coy over the precise location.

The purpose-built 100-room easyHotel could open in 2019 with rooms costing as little as £19.99 a night.

Newmarket Road is already home to a Travelodge and a Premier Inn.

Meanwhile, the upper end of the city hotel market will be boosted this summer by the reopening of the flagship £205-a-night University Arms, on Parker’s Piece, following its £80million renovation.

Cambridge would be easyHotel’s third leased site. The hotel will be let on a 25-year FRI (fully repairing and insuring) lease at an annual rent of approximately £625,000.

The hotel will be developed by MP Merchant, in line with easyHotel’s specifications.

Guy Parsons, CEO of easyHotel plc, said: “Having recently completed a successful fundraising to fund the acceleration of our owned hotel portfolio, this announcement is a clear signal of our intent and ambition to expand our development pipeline, targeting popular business and leisure city centre locations.

“The Cambridge site takes easyHotel’s pipeline of owned/leased development projects to 1,041 rooms, adding one of the UK’s most thriving and popular cities to our network.

“The board looks forward to announcing further opportunities in due course.”

easyHotel’s strategy is to target the super budget segment of the hotel industry by marketing ‘clean, comfortable and safe’ hotel rooms to its customers.

The firm’s seven owned hotels currently comprise 702 rooms, and it has a further 19 franchised hotels with 1,641 rooms.

Their owned hotels include Old Street , in London, Glasgow, Croydon, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, while their franchise locations include Brussels, Berlin, Edinburgh, London Heathrow and Luton.