INTERNATIONAL leisure group Hilton Hotels Corporation will this week unveil two of its biggest development deals since being acquired last year.

The tie-ups will see 30 more of its budget Hampton Inn hotels opened in Britain and 25 new mid-market Hilton Garden Inns across Turkey. The total cost of the new properties is likely to reach $1 billion (£508m).

Hilton has agreed a management deal with HLH, a property company specialising in the hotel sector, to open the UK sites. HLH will build and own the properties while Hilton will get a contract to run them.

The 4,000 rooms are expected to open within five years.

A similar partnership will operate in Turkey, where developer Kosifler Group will finance the new hotels and Hilton will run them.

Turkey is regarded as a key growth market for Hilton, along with a number of other countries, including Britain and Ireland, Spain, Italy, Russia, China and India.

Plans to grow in the budget end of the UK market could be well timed. A report due out this week from TRI Hospitality Consulting says the sector is forecast to grow by 60% in terms of room numbers by 2017.

The report found that in the first three months of 2008, room revenues at budget hotels grew by 9.2%, compared with an 8.8% increase for the same period last year.

Ian Carter, president of global operations for Hilton Hotels Corporation, said he was confident that despite an economic slowdown in Britain, the new hotels would succeed.

“Everything being developed will have the highest technological design. Therefore, this will undoubtedly give them an advantage versus the competition,” he said.

Blackstone, the US investment firm that bought Hilton last year, set a goal of opening 1,000 hotels. It operates about 250 sites outside of the Americas.

In part, the target will be achieved by Hilton moving some of its brands such as Hampton Inn and Doubletree out of the US for the first time. Executives at Ascot are considering reviving plans to build a hotel at the famous Berkshire racecourse.

The board looked at incorporating a hotel when it built the new £220m grandstand, but the idea was shelved on grounds of cost.

However, the plan could be resurrected, although it would need to obtain planning permission, and executives are examining the feasibility.

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