Travelodge, the budget hotel operator, will continue its march into Britain’s biggest cities today when it announces new projects in Edinburgh and Manchester as part of an expansion thrust costing almost £50 million.

The group, which is owned by Dubai International Capital, has exchanged contracts on ten new sites that will add 857 rooms and create 250 jobs, most of whom will be recruited from Job Centre Plus.

The ten projects, which will be leased by Travelodge, include two in Edinburgh — a 93-room hotel at Waterloo Place and one with 43 rooms on Rose Street — plus a 157-room property in Manchester Piccadilly.

Paul Harvey, the chain’s managing director for development, said that the ten new sites took the number of contracts exchanged so far this year to 60, a record for the company, despite the difficult property market.

Mr Harvey said: “We are now the biggest hotel brand in Edinburgh, having doubled our room stock in the city in the last 24 months, and we now have eight sites in Manchester.”

Some of the other projects to be announced today include a 99-room hotel in Ealing, West London, and properties in Ipswich, Llanelli, Newbury and Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Travelodge, which was founded in 1985, operates 385 hotels with a total of 27,000 rooms, of which ten are in Ireland and three in Spain. Its target is 1,000 hotels with 70,000 rooms by 2020.

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