Sercotel Hotel Group strengthens its commitment to Barcelona with the incorporation into its network of two of the three hotels that the Ayre Hotels chain had in the city. As of this Friday, April 1, the Ayre Hotel Caspe and the Ayre Hotel Rossellón will be transformed into Sercotel Caspe and Sercotel Rosellón. Both have a four-star category and add up to 246 rooms.
With this operation, the hotel chain of the Gallardo family, owner of the pharmaceutical company Almirall, doubles its presence in Barcelona city, going on to have four establishments. This commitment to strengthening its position in the center of the Catalan capital comes in the midst of the reactivation of business tourism after the pandemic and in parallel with the celebration of important trade fairs such as Alimentaria & Hostelco, ISE, Seafood and Hispack, all of them scheduled for this second quarter.
Ayre Hotels is a chain specialized in urban hotels founded 50% by El Corte Inglés and the Palladium group, owned by the Matutes family. After several attempts to sell the company, last January they found a buyer: the French private equity giant Eurazeo, which invests in the hotel sector in alliance with the Canadian fund PSP Investments. With this divestment, the objective of El Corte Inglés and Palladium is to strengthen the Only You brand, which operates in a more premium segment and which they also control equally.
It is estimated that Eurazeo paid around 140 million euros for Ayre Hotels, but the transaction did not include the chain's eight establishments, only five, with a total of 800 rooms and located in Barcelona, Madrid, Córdoba and Oviedo (2). The Barcelona hotel included in the purchase is the Ayre Gran Via, located next to the Montjuïc exhibition center and Plaza España, with 189 rooms.
The Hotel Ayre Sevilla was left out of the operation and will be transformed into an Only You. Nothing was said about the future of the other two Ayre hotels in Barcelona and now Sercotel has announced that it has just incorporated them into its brand under a management regime.
"These new additions allow us to strengthen our presence in a top-tier destination like Barcelona with two high-quality hotels. The company thus takes a new step forward in the deployment of our ambitious expansion plan, improving our offering in a prime location as well as for the MICE segment," explains José Rodríguez Pousa, CEO of Sercotel.
The new Sercotel Caspe, in the area of influence of Plaza Catalunya and Arc de Triomf, has 141 rooms and facilities to host congresses and conventions. For its part, Sercotel Rosellón has 105 rooms and is located just 200 meters from the Sagrada Familia, with a terrace offering privileged views of the basilica.
With these two additions, Sercotel now has nine establishments in the province of Barcelona and by the end of next year will have a new hotel located near El Prat Airport, with one hundred rooms.
In total, the Barcelona-based chain operates 110 hotels in Spain and Latin America under management, franchise, or lease agreements. Since July 2020, 100% of Sercotel belongs to Grupo Corporativo Landon, the Gallardo family's investment holding. Until then, Landon owned 47% of the capital, and the rest was held by the three founding partners: Marisol Turró, Javier Garro, and Benjamín Sanz.