UK stadium hotels need drivers outside of sports

Hotels within United Kingdom sports stadiums are becoming more common as guests choose to incorporate attendance at sporting events with weekend and overnight leisure stays, according to sources.

The British market for such travel differs from that of the U.S. in that it is more feasible to leave home, attend a game and return all within the same day, sources added.

Soccer, rugby and cricket are the most popular sports for travelers, but facilities at horse-racing courses also incorporate hotels, such as the 54-room Holiday Inn Wolverhampton-Racecourse in Wolverhampton, 15 miles northwest of Birmingham.

At the September opening of the Hilton Garden Inn Emirates Old Trafford, which is part of Lancashire County Cricket Club’s Old Trafford cricket stadium, Nick Smart, Hilton’s VP of development for North and West Europe, said “10 more hotels would be developed (by Hilton) at sports stadiums around the U.K., predominantly at soccer, rugby, cricket and horse racing venues.”

One critical point about sports-stadia hotels in the U.K., sources said, is that they cannot survive merely on business emanating from sporting action.

Justin Hopwood, sales and marketing director at LCCC, which owns and operates the Old Trafford hotel, said his anticipated revenue mix would come from domestic and international cricket matches, but mostly from conferences and events business at both the hotel and the stadium.

“This is best-run cricket club in the world, and that underpins the model of sustainability,” said Anthony Mundy, operations director at LCCC.

To Hopwood and Mundy’s point, cricket at Old Trafford follows a boom-and-bust scenario, with some years having no or few blue-ribbon sporting fixtures but 2019 seeing five Cricket World Cup games and a five-day Test Match between England and Australia, cricket’s biggest rivalry and which can only happen in the U.K. every four years or so.

“It is not Premiership (soccer) or the (National Football League),” Hopwood added.

Despite almost 20,000 attending the domestic “War of the Roses” cricket game between Lancashire and Yorkshire and 61,481 attending across five days for this year’s Test Match between England and South Africa, meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions business has to anchor everything, Hopwood and Mundy added.

“We welcomed 750 events in 2016 with a combined revenue of £3.7 million ($4.9 million),” Mundy said.