LLANELLI: Town’s Premier Inn goes up for sale with the Sandpiper as Whitbread seeks ‘whole site exit’

Llanelli’s Premier Inn is up for sale, Swansea Bay News can reveal, with Whitbread marketing the hotel and the newly closed Sandpiper together as it seeks a “whole site exit” from the town.

The Sandpiper “is on the market for sale as a going concern along with the adjoining Premier Inn”, a Whitbread spokesperson said. “We are in discussions with a number of interested parties for this whole site exit.”

The 28-room Premier Inn Llanelli Central West on Sandpiper Road is the smallest of Whitbread’s local hotels.

Until a sale is finalised, the company said, food and drink will be served from the Sandpiper to hotel guests.

“We’d love to thank our team and guests for their loyalty to The Sandpiper over the years,” the spokesperson added.

The lakeside restaurant at Sandy Water Park closed with the rest of the Brewers Fayre estate on Monday, its doors already locked when Swansea Bay News visited on the final day, months after the community rallied to save it.

A sale as a going concern is the outcome many customers called for in the spring, when hundreds hoped a buyer would come forward to keep the lakeside site open.

The picture is different at Swansea Vale in Llansamlet, where the town’s other former Brewers Fayre will be converted into an in-house restaurant for the Premier Inn next door, serving hotel guests “including our famous breakfast”, with no additional rooms.

When the closures were first announced, both local sites had been expected to become extra bedrooms for their neighbouring hotels. Whitbread has now confirmed different plans for each: conversion at Swansea Vale, and a full exit at Llanelli.

What becomes of the Sandy Water Park site will now depend on who buys it.

3,600 rooms and a 15,000-a-year workforce

The company also set out the national picture behind the local changes. Whitbread first announced its Accelerating Growth Plan to sell a number of its branded restaurants in April 2024.

In April 2026 it extended the programme, subject to consultation, to cover all remaining branded restaurants, in a move it says will add 3,600 hotel extension rooms “in locations where we know we have strong demand”. Following that consultation, the spokesperson said, “we have now taken the decision to proceed”.

“We recognise the impact of this proposal on colleagues,” they said, adding that the business recruits around 15,000 people every year and is “aiming to redeploy as many of those impacted colleagues as possible”.

Every hotel will keep serving breakfast and dinner, with branded restaurants replaced by restaurants inside the hotel, a format the company says already operates in over half of Premier Inns.

The email also confirmed the timetable for the last of the brands: Table Table and Cookhouse + Pub served their final meals on 3 September, Brewers Fayre followed after dinner service on Sunday 7 September, and Beefeater’s turn comes on Thursday 10 September.

That confirms the final day for the Waterfront Beefeater in Swansea’s SA1, which serves its last meals this week.

The Llanelli sale comes even as the hotel chain grows elsewhere: last week its property brochure revealed Premier Inn wants entirely new hotels in Mumbles, Carmarthen and the Milford Haven area.

Swansea Bay News will follow the sale of the Sandy Water Park site.