Hilton Hotels Corporation (HHC), the US hotel operator, is planning more than 1,000 job losses, many in the UK, under a $250 million (£175 million) cost-cutting programme. HHC, controlled by Blackstone Group, announced plans to close its corporate headquarters in Beverly Hills, California, and move to Virginia last week. The 500 staff at its Watford international centre also expect big job cuts.

The cost-cutting is being pushed through by Christopher Nassetta, appointed president and chief executive after Blackstone's $26 billion buyout of HHC in October 2007. Mr Nassetta had McKinsey, the management consultant, conduct a review to cut $200 million to $250 million of costs.

McKinsey is understood to have suggested the closure of HHC's Beverly Hills headquarters, where about 1,000 people are based, to save money. The company said last week it expected the move to the East Coast to create 300 full-time jobs in Fairfax County.

HHC declined to comment although industry sources confirmed that its offices in Watford, Dubai and Singapore would all suffer job losses. Insiders expect at least half the employees in Watford to lose their jobs as the old Hilton International headquarters becomes a European centre.

It has 3,200 hotels in 77 countries, employing about 135,000 staff. It is believed to be cutting jobs at the 15 per cent of hotels it owns or manages and its franchisees are likely to follow suit. Like its peers, it is reacting to a drop in trading in 2008's final quarter.

Blackstone's buyout of HHC came little more than 18 months after the company, then purely an American operator, had reunited the Hilton brand by buying Hilton International from the London-listed Hilton Group, now Ladbrokes. The growth potential of the reunited Hilton brand is the main reason that Blackstone, the private equity firm, decided to invest $26 billion, but the subsequent financial crisis has all but wiped out the $5.5 billion of equity it put in the deal.

— Barbara Cassani, chairman of Jurys Inns and former head of London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, said the budget hotel chain would create 800 jobs over the next two years in ten new hotels, nine in the UK and one in Prague.

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