Whitbread plc (WTB) Q3 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Whitbread Full Year 26 Q3 Trading Update Call. My name is Sammy, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad to remove yourself from the question queue. I'd now like to hand over to your host, Dominic Poole, CEO of Whitbread, to begin. Please go ahead, Dominic. Thank you, Sammy. Good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining the call for our Q3 full year 2036 trading update. I'm joined by Hemant Kel, our group CFO. Hope you've had a chance to review our announcement this morning. I'm going to start with a brief overview for those who haven't seen it before opening up the call for Q&A when Hemant and I will be happy to answer your questions. I'll start with a few comments on our balance of performance in the quarter. We saw strong trading momentum in both the UK and Germany. And as I'll come on to shortly, I'm pleased to say this has strengthened into the current trading period. In the UK, the return to market growth that we saw in the summer has continued, and occupancy remains high at 83%. Redpile is up 3%, and we maintain a healthy premium, versus the rest of the mid-scale and economy market. We traded particularly well in London, where we increased both occupancy and rates, resulting in Redpile up 7%, versus the prior year. UK food and beverage sales were in line with our expectations as we continued to make excellent progress on our accelerating growth plan that will both improve the guest experience and drive higher returns to shareholders by transforming some of our lower returning brand restaurants into ...