Two Brighton hotels have been given new names by the company that bought them as part of an £800 million deal five years ago.
The Jurys Inn hotels on Brighton seafront and next to the railway station, both of which have more than 200 bedrooms, are being rebranded as Leonardo hotels.
New signage was fitted to the 4* hotels today (Thursday 17 November) as a nationwide rebranding exercise nears completion.
The hotel chain was bought by the Fattal Hotel Group, owned by Israeli billionaire David Fattal, in 2017.
The company said that the Jurys Inn Brighton – by the railway station – would be officially renamed Leonardo Hotel Brighton today.
And, it said, the Jurys Inn Brighton Waterfront would be officially renamed Leonardo Royal Hotel Brighton Waterfront today.
Leonardo Royal hotels tend to be bigger and more likely to have spa facilities and a greater number of meeting rooms.
Fattal is renaming all 35 Jurys Inn hotels throughout the British Isles. Once the rebranding is completed, it will have 51 Leonardo hotels – 46 in the UK and five in Ireland.
The company owns about 100 more Leonardo branded hotels abroad and about 80 others operating under other names.
Jason Carruthers, managing director of Jurys Inn and Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland, said: “Beyond this rebranding programme, we have very ambitious plans to continue growing our footprint in the UK and Ireland through new acquisitions and developments, along with some enhancements across our range of products and services.”
Fattal worked with Swedish hotel investment group Pandox to buy the Jurys Inn portfolio from Lone Star Funds five years ago.
It was reported that Pandox bought the real estate while Fattal bought the hotels business.
Fattal has since raised hundreds of millions of pounds to spend on refurbishing and renovating its hotels and looking out for further acquisitions, it said.
The rebrand will mean the end for the Jurys name which dates back to 1839 when William Jury opened a guesthouse in College Green, in Dublin.
The Leonardo hotel on the seafront was originally the Ramada Renaissance Hotel. It has since also traded as the Thistle and the Hospitality Inn as well as a Jurys Inn. One of the buildings that it replaced was Harrison’s Hotel.
When the Ramada opened in September 1987, the 204-bedroom property was the biggest hotel to have been built in Brighton for a generation.
The construction costs totalled £25 million and the new hotel was intended to capitalise on the boom in the conference trade.
However often it is “rebranded” (such a silly word), that seafront hotel is hideous. It resembles a giant greenhouse.
The original design had an arch between Bartholemew Square and the A259. While it wouldn’t have improved the look of the building much, it would at least have improved walking links between the Lanes & the seafront!
With all due respect Christopher, rebranding is a perfectly good word in my dictionary. The word derives from the branding of livestock as a mark of ownership. Times change, and the word works equally well with corporate ownership. I also don’t think the seafront building is hideous. It stands close to some fairly impressive architecture, it’s true, but it’s better than much else that has gone up along the seafront in Hove in recent times. Having stayed there once, I have no grumbles of any note about the interior either.
Not hideous maybe, but incredibly dull, and totally lacking character, like most modern buildings in Brighton and Hove unfortunately.
I remember when the council agreed the dirty deal for the hideous redevelopment. Free offices and don’t ask questions.
I was employed there in the service-department in part-time in 1987 from the pre-opening phase until October for 4 months, because I made my apprenticeship in the hotel of the same name in Hamburg before, and what I can say is that the Ramada Renaissance Hotel-Chain was a 5-star-hotel-chain of first-class-service in the past, where everybody became a chance to work for. We worked there with different of nationalities in all offered departments.
It was a very good experience with additionally a nice surrounding due to the exclusively waterfront-position at the coast of Brighton. Nevertheless I had also make bad experiences there due to the employed condition, where I wasn’t employed subject to social insurance contributions (no pension insurance), so I have no right of Pension here in Germany. The 4 months are lost and not named/marked/fixed in my Pension history.