Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner for the global travel and tourism industry, today announces a distribution deal with Premier Inn, the UK and Ireland’s biggest hotel chain, which will allow 580 of the chain’s properties to be booked through Amadeus.

The deal will enable Premier Inn to continue to expand its distribution beyond the UK and Irish domestic markets, and focus on key markets including France, Spain, Italy and Germany. As the UK and Ireland’s biggest budget hotel chain Premier Inn is ideally placed to attract European holidaymakers looking for good value for money breaks, as recent figures suggest visits to European destinations are expected to grow 2.4% in 2010 and then accelerate to 3.8% in 2011[1]. The deal will also help Premier Inn to attract more business travellers to their properties, as rooms for the chain will now be accessible through over 103,000 points of sale worldwide.

The distribution deal has added over 42,000 rooms within the UK and Ireland to Amadeus. The budget rates offered by Premier Inn provide ideal content for many Amadeus subscribers, as cost-conscious travellers, from both the leisure and corporate sectors, increasingly look for good value accommodation.

Hugo Ehrnreich, Head of Hotel Distribution at Amadeus, said: “Having Premier Inn content is great news for us as it further increases our UK and Ireland market coverage and gives Amadeus a well-balanced portfolio of hotel content across all price ranges.  This is an important part of Amadeus’ commitment to providing relevant content, as recent feedback from our travel agency partners shows that demand for budget hotels is soaring. We’re also pleased to say that we were Premier Inn’s first global distribution choice, and we look forward to building on this successful partnership.”

Gerard Tempest, Marketing Director for Premier Inn, said: “Amadeus was an obvious distribution choice for Premier Inn – their global reach and in-depth knowledge of different markets matches our business expansion strategy. Through Amadeus we’ve got a real-time data exchange to instantly provide our content to bookers all over the world. It’s an extremely cost-effective solution and we are fortunate to be able to use the same provider for our revenue management and global distribution solutions.” 

The implementation of Premier’s 580 properties on Amadeus begins mid-July and work will proceed in phases: prioritizing airport and major city hotels. The implementation will be complete by mid-August this year, when all Premier Inn content will be fully bookable.

Amadeus already provides Revenue Management Systems (RMS) to all Premier Inn properties in the UK: the new deal will expand the partnership to include distribution as well as IT.