The ground floor of the former Barclays Bank building, 148-150 Parade, was converted into a 148-cover restaurant, with 13 bedrooms on the floor above. This expansion created 30 new jobs.

 

Six more rooms are planned in the main hotel adjacent to the restaurant in early 2019. Once complete, the hotel will have 100 guest bedrooms.

 

Graham Hedley, project and programme manager at Premier Inn, who led the extension of the hotel for Whitbread, said: "The successful extension of Premier Inn Leamington Spa is a great example of how Whitbread’s development expertise adds value to our hotel assets.

 

"By spotting an opportunity to extend the popular hotel, we have been able to bring our latest Bar + Block restaurant format to Leamington Spa, add guest bedrooms and breathe fresh life into a previously vacant listed building.

 

"I am particularly proud of the fact that we have been able to introduce the Bar + Block without changing the exterior elevation of the historic former bank building.

 

"We have also retained many of the original internal features of the listed building in the new Premier Inn bedrooms.

 

"Our alterations provide a positive heritage benefit and bring a new and exciting restaurant brand to Leamington."

 

Bill Wareing, of Wareing & Company Property Consultants, Leamington Spa, advised the freehold owner on the letting.

 

He said: "It’s great to see this property being brought to life and brings another great asset to Leamington town centre.

 

"It brings a great new place to eat and drink and adds much-needed hotel bedrooms to our town centre, so we are very pleased to have played a part in the deal."

 

Chris Elliott, chief executive of Warwick District Council, added: "We are delighted that Whitbread have decided to make an investment in the heart of Royal Leamington Spa adding to the very successful Premier Inn Hotel."

 

Source: Insider Media

 

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It is vital for hotels to have an accurate record of who is in the building, since not only do they have guests coming and going constantly but they also have cleaning staff, maintenance staff, kitchen staff, bar staff, and many other staff members. 

 

Since many of these staff members will be temporary agency staff, they are likely to still rely on old-fashioned paper timesheet to record their weekly hours.

 

Getting employees to retrospectively record their hours worked directly onto paper is not only open to fraud and mistakes, it also makes room for human error further up the chain. 

 

Managers have to collect and approve all the timesheets. A study has shown that this can take more than 15 minutes per employee. Those numbers quickly mount up! 

 

The accompanying restaurant Premier Inn has created may fall victim to the same trap, as the restaurant and retail industries in particular are still very prone to rely on manual timesheets. 

 

Thankfully there’s an easy solution. A workforce management system from Time and Attendance Midlands would bring your attendance systems up to date and reduce workloads considerably.

 

Managers would no longer need to approve every single timesheet every single week or month, and accounts staff would no longer need to laboriously type up the timesheets to enter them into the payroll system. 

 

All the staff would need to do is clock in and out using one of our terminals, with either a smartcard or a biometric measurement (fingers or hands). This data is collected in our WinTA.NET software, and it can be exported straight to common payroll systems such as Sagepay.