El Corte Inglés and Palladium Hotel Group, which have a 50% stake in the hotel business, have decided to sell the Ayre chain to Eurazeo and focus on the high value-added hotel segment by developing new establishments of the Only YOU Hotels chain. Eurazeo is an investment firm formed by the April 2001 merger of Azeo and Eurafrance.
The amount of the operation has not been made public, although sources in the sector point to elEconomista that it would be around 130 million euros.
The operation includes the sale of five Ayre brand hotels, totaling nearly 800 rooms, located in Barcelona, Madrid, Córdoba and Oviedo, as well as a plot of land in Porto (Portugal). The new owner of these hotels will be Eurazeo, a French investment group that has assets under management for a volume of 27,000 million euros and that, in addition to investing in real estate, has a private equity branch, with a portfolio of 450 companies, and another debt.
To carry out this transaction, El Corte Inglés and Palladium Hotel Group, which have operated together in the hotel sector since 2006 with the Only YOU Hotels and Ayre Hotels brands, have had BBVA and Deloitte as financial advisors, and Arcadis as technical advisor. The operation is subject to the authorization of the competition authorities.
Likewise, Palladium Hotel Group and El Corte Inglés plan to transform Ayre Hotel Sevilla into a new Only YOU, with the aim of reinforcing its position in this high-end segment. This hotel in Seville, the fifth of the Only YOU Hotels brand, will join those that the chain already has in Madrid (Atocha and Barquillo), Valencia and Malaga, the latter under management.
“The Only YOU Hotels brand is distinguished by luxury focused on small details, in which the guest is always the protagonist and in which its teams know the latest news in the city. In addition, they are dynamic hotels with a permanent offer of events and experiences and are characterized by their groundbreaking aesthetics and their warm and sophisticated environments,” El Corte Inglés said in a statement.
In this sense, both companies are now analyzing various options in privileged locations in various cities, both in Spain and in other countries, to increase their presence in the premium hotel segment.
The fact that the alliance between Palladium and El Corte Inglés is maintained does not mean that the giant of the department stores in Spain has discarded the idea of starting a hotel business on its own. Thus, it could take advantage of part of its portfolio of assets to transform them into new four-star establishments, starting with a building that it owns in the Salamanca district of Madrid, in the middle of Goya’s commercial artery.
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