Holiday Inn, Leicester

Case Study

Client:

Cerberus European Servicing

Project:

Contract Duration:

15 weeks

the
project

We recently completed three multi-million-pound refurbishment projects for IHG (Intercontinental Hotel Group) on Holiday Inn hotels in Leicester, Coventry and High Wycombe.

This particular case study relates to the complete refurbishment of the Holiday Inn in the heart of Leicester city centre, a 194-bedroom hotel, including several suites and public areas. This project was phased over a fifteen week fast-track programme ensuring disruption to the hotel guests was kept to an absolute minimum.

Given the hotel comprised of eight floors of bedrooms, managing the phasing was critical. To achieve this successfully, we at the outset made the decision to appoint two full time contract managers. One to manage the public areas and another to control the bedroom refurbishment.

We felt this was a sensible approach as the areas and decision making process between us, the professional team and the hotel staff worked better.
The first phase of the project was to completely strip-out and then fully refurbish all of the bedrooms on floor two. This consisted of twenty-seven bedrooms and was completed in four weeks whilst the hotel remained fully operational.

The scope of this phase included complete redecoration using our own in-house decorators installing ‘Muraspec’ high quality commercial wallpaper and a bespoke ‘Gaskell’ carpet design to bedrooms and ‘ege’ carpet in the corridors which are compliant with IHG’s brand standard. After two weeks of starting phase one we commenced phase two, thus working on two floors (54 rooms) at any one time. All the bedrooms had a complete re-wire and new distribution boards were fitted.

The bathrooms throughout the 194 rooms received a full refurbishment, which consisted of re-grouting and replacing the showers and taps. We refurbished all of the baths using a ‘Bath doctor’ and finishing them off with fresh new silicon. We also managed alterations to all of the lighting, small power and data to suit the reconfigured bedrooms.

The total bedroom refurbishment starting on floor two and then agreed with the hotel for phasing reasons from floor eight, working downwards floor by floor, were all completed in
four weeks per floor and the bedroom refurbishment process took fifteen weeks overall. On floors three, four and seven we were instructed to install new air conditioning.
We then commenced the public area refurbishment four weeks into the overall project. This included the restaurant, bars, lounge, large academy rooms on the ground and first floor, swimming pool area refresh and reception area, which took eleven weeks in total and was phased to accommodate hotel functions. To achieve this, we worked with the hotel setting up temporary restaurants, reception area and temporary lounge areas, whilst still maintaining the use of the remaining conference facilities.

The areas were completed with high quality decoration finishes using our own in-house skilled, time served decorators. Bespoke items of joinery and soft and hard floor finishes were installed. In the reception area, we undertook the installation of a new modern bespoke reception desk and rear back fitting.

Working within this occupied hotel was logistically complex and as such, we also had to plan and programme the complete refurbishment of staff offices, welfare area and all meeting rooms, this was only achieved with daily communication between our staff and the management, working with the hotel to maintain a positive customer experience.
As an addendum to our contract we also managed all of the ‘fire stopping/fire damper’ works to ensure fire compartmentation was achieved and certified throughout the hotel using a specialist fire stopping company. We also managed the removal of all notifiable asbestos which we managed to do within the original programme.

Project
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