HOTEL HUNT: Premier Inn wants new hotels in Mumbles, Carmarthen and Milford Haven

Premier Inn wants a hotel in Mumbles. And in Carmarthen. And in the Milford Haven and Pembroke area.

All three appear on the hotel giant’s list of target locations for new sites, published in the current property brochure on owner Whitbread’s website, which invites landowners and developers to come forward.

None of the three has a Premier Inn today. The nearest are in Swansea, Llanelli and on the A40 outside Haverfordwest.

The Wales wish list runs to nine locations in all, and small coastal and market towns dominate: Barmouth, Betws-y-Coed, Brecon, Cardigan and Llandrindod Wells are on it too, alongside Newport.

The list covers both the full-size Premier Inn format and hub by Premier Inn, the company’s more compact version.

It is an ambition backed by scale. Whitbread has more than 86,000 rooms across around 850 UK hotels, and YouGov’s 2026 hotel brand rankings, published last month, named Premier Inn the country’s most considered hotel brand, 21 percentage points clear of its nearest rival.

Published as the restaurants close

The brochure’s ambitions surface on a pointed day. Monday is the last day of the Brewers Fayre brand in the UK, with all 89 remaining restaurants closing for good, including the Sandpiper in Llanelli and Swansea Vale in Llansamlet.

Whitbread announced in the spring that it would cut up to 3,800 jobs and leave its branded restaurants entirely. Chief executive Dominic Paul called the plan a move to “a higher-margin, higher-returning pure-play hotel business”.

In Llanelli and Llansamlet, the closing restaurants are expected to become extra bedrooms for the small Premier Inns beside them, though no planning application has yet been lodged for either site.

Fewer places to eat, more rooms to sleep in. The target list is the other half of that strategy: entirely new hotels, in places the company has never been.

What the company says a hotel is worth

Research commissioned by Whitbread puts a number on what a new hotel means for a town: more than £4.2m a year spent with local businesses at each Premier Inn location.

The study, carried out by Turley Economics and Ipsos, surveyed more than 27,600 customers and estimates guests spend £1.8bn a year in local economies across the UK and Ireland on food, drink, entertainment, shopping and travel.

It also claims more than a quarter of customers would not visit a destination at all if a Premier Inn were not available, and that most guests who eat out do so locally, with 59% spending over £50 during their stay.

Those figures come from the company’s own commissioned research, and they are the case it makes to councils and communities when it wants to build.

An ambition, not yet a plan

The brochure names no sites, and a place on a target list is an ambition rather than a planning application: no locations are identified and no deals confirmed.

But the choices say plenty. Mumbles, a village of independent guesthouses, boutiques and the pier, is exactly the kind of place where a national chain hotel would start a conversation the moment a site was named.

Carmarthen, the county town, would be getting its first too, and its hotel trade is already moving: the Falcon on Lammas Street, one of the town’s oldest hotels, went up for sale last month after more than half a century in the same family, still trading profitably.

The Pembroke and Milford Haven corridor, with its coast path visitors and energy industry trade, rounds out the local trio.

Anyone with a site to offer is invited to contact the company’s Wales acquisition team, the brochure says. Whether anyone comes forward, and where, is the next chapter.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.