Malone steps down at Jurys

Mr Peter Malone is to retire as managing director of Jurys Doyle Hotel Group on April 30th and will be succeeded, as planned, by chief executive designate, Mr Pat McCann. Mr Malone will remain on the board as a non-executive director.

Mr Malone has been managing director for more than 11 years, a period which saw Jurys move from being a domestic hotel operator into an international group. He oversaw the first expansion outside Ireland with the acquisition of the Pond Hotel in Glasgow in 1990 and later the sale of Aer Lingus' stake in the group.

He also expanded the group into a new, untried area in Ireland: the Budget Inn, in Christchurch Place, Dublin. His biggest move was last April when Jurys, which then had eight hotels and nine Inns, made a bid for the Doyle Hotel group, its main domestic competitor. Since that acquisition, the hotel group has continued to expand with the purchase of a property in central London for which it plans a 170-bedroom hotel.

The group now controls about 10 per cent of the hotel rooms in the Republic and the latest results, announced last month, showed a 64 per cent rise in pre-tax profit to €27.8 million (£21.9 million) in the six months to the end of October 1999.

Mr Malone said the figures showed that the integration of Jurys and Doyle groups had been successful with all the hotels making a strong contribution. The group is considering further expansion in the British market.