Whitbread to cut 3,800 jobs as it pivots to pure hotel business

Premier Inn owner Whitbread is to cut around 3,800 jobs in the UK and Ireland as it resets its five-year business strategy, following tax rises and pressure from a US activist investor.

The cuts will affect around 12% of Whitbread’s 30,000-strong workforce in the UK and Ireland working in its Beefeater and Brewers Fayre restaurants, which are usually located next to or inside Premier Inn hotels. The company said consultations with affected employees would begin immediately.

Whitbread said it expected to retain a “significant proportion” of those affected and would try to find alternative roles for them, given it hires around 15,000 people each year.

The cuts come after Whitbread began a fresh review of its business in November, a year after it first announced its five-year plan, after it was hit by higher costs in the chancellor’s budget.

Britain’s largest hotel operator had already been in the process of converting some of its underperforming Beefeater and Brewers Fayre restaurants into hotel rooms.

Whitbread warned following Rachel Reeves’s 2025 budget that tax changes would cost it an additional £50m this year, amid changes to the way business rates are calculated. This came hot on the heels of an earlier cost squeeze due to higher wage bills and rising food prices.

Whitbread’s new strategy means that it will become a pure hotel business, some seven years after it sold the Costa Coffee chain to soft drinks giant Coca-Cola in a near £4bn deal.

This means that the Beefeater restaurant brand - established in 1974 and known for serving steaks and classic pub dishes – will disappear from UK high streets.