Check in for London's great hotel gold rush

Boom time for five-star establishments with a new wave of openings

- JONATHAN PRYNN

London is on the brink of a new luxury hotel "gold rush" with destinations offering hundreds of five-star level rooms and suites due to open over the next 18 months.

Hoteliers have been encouraged by the response to the first wave of grand new launches that began last autumn when the Peninsula at Hyde Park Corner and the Raffles London at the OWO in Whitehall became the capital's first billion-pound hotels.

Fears that they would saturate central London with £1,000-a-night-plus rooms that they could not fill appear to have been allayed by continuing strong occupancy levels and generally robust room rates, despite softening slightly although only to the still dizzying level of around £900 - over the summer.

Philip Camble, director of hotel sector analysts Whitebridge Hospitality, said that London luxury hotel occupancy rates had strengthened through the first half of 2024 to reach 80 per cent by June, just ahead of 2023. This had been enough to offset the weaker rates so that overall revenue per available room, or RevPAR- the key financial yardstick used by the industry to measure performance - had remained solid despite the extra hotels coming on stream. He said: "London is a phenomenal place, it defies the rules that apply to most markets around the world; it's almost like a different country.