Crest Hotels Limited was a Bass-Charrington subsidiary operating the hotel interests of the brewery company in the United Kingdom. Crest's headquarters were in the former Hunt Edmunds brewery premises in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
Initially all the Bass, Mitchells and Butler's (BMB) and Charrington's hotels were transferred into the Crest Hotels portfolio and by 1970 new, purpose-built hotels were under construction. As new properties opened, a programme of disposals of the older, less economically attractive hotels was initiated.
The European hotel interests of the Esso Petroleum Company were acquired by Bass-Charrington in 1972. These were modern, purpose-built hotels located in UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Scandinavia, the latter network wasn't part of the deal due to local regulatory requirements relating to control of hotels by brewers. Crest bought 17 Esso Motor Hotels outside Scandinavia, 3 in The Netherlands, 3 in Italy, 2 in Belgium, 8 in the United Kingdom and the ninth British hotel, at that time under construction at Runcorn. The 9 German and only Austrian hotel were leased form Esso. The hotels in UK were absorbed by Crest and the European hotels were supervised by a Crest senior management team based in Germany. In 1976 Crest rebranded their hotels in EuroCrest and wanted to expand in Germany. The newly built hotels in Germany were branded as EuroCrest and Crest bought the leased German and Austrian hotels so they could be branded as EuroCrest as well.
In 1990, the group was bought by Trusthouse Forte and rebranded as Forte Crest before later being absorbed into the Posthouse chain.
Famous quotes containing the words crest and/or hotels:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)