The hospitality industry in the United Kingdom is largely represented by the country's hotels, pubs, restaurants and leisure companies, and produces around 4% of UK GDP.
There are over 207,000 eating venues in England, and around 25% of these are fast-food outlets.
According to the British Beer and Pub Association, around 8.5 billion pints of beer were sold, with 7.4 billion 175ml glasses of wine, and 1.2 billion pints of cider in the UK in 2018. Beer has 54 pence of duty per pint. There are around 2530 breweries in the UK.
In 2022 the hospitality industry was the 3rd biggest employer in the UK, accounting for 3.5m jobs through direct employment, and a further 3.0m indirectly.[1]
In 2022 the UK hospitality industry paid around £54bn in tax receipts.[1]
The National Skills Academy for Food & Drink (NSAFD) is at York.[4] The Institute of Hospitality was known as HCIMA - Hotel and Catering International Management Association, which became the IoH in April 2007. The Hotel and Catering Institute was founded in 1949; the professional body merged with the Institutional Management Association in 1971. Hotel, Restaurant & Catering (HRC) is a main national event.
Greene King and Mitchells & Butlers are two of the biggest apprenticeship providers in the UK, with around 1,500 each; only the armed forces, BT and HMRC have more numbers of apprenticeships.
Victor Ceserani MBE pioneered catering education in the UK, when he was head of catering at Ealing College, now part of University of West London; this had been Acton Hotel and Catering School until 1957 and trained many airline catering staff; he wrote The Theory of Catering and Practical Cookery, with Ronald Kinton and David Foskett (academic).
The University of Strathclyde had the Scottish Hotel School in the late 1960s. Strathclyde and the University of Surrey were the first two universities in UK to have hotel and catering management courses, both at the same time. The University of Surrey moved to its present site in 1968 and was the first in the UK to offer a course for hotel and catering: a BSc in hotel and catering management, with a 48-week professional year starting in the March of the second year; the course was led by Brian Archer from 1978. Another important place for catering was the Dorset Institute of Higher Education, since 1992 being known as Bournemouth University.[7]
The 1,019-room Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel in April 2011; it is owned by PPHE Hotel Group, and next to the Thames in Lambeth
The 39-storey Novotel London Canary Wharf (40 Marsh Wall) is the tallest purpose-built hotel in the UK, at 419 feet; it is the tallest Novotel hotel (owned by Accor); it opened in April 2017; it has beehives on the 39th floor, which produce fresh honey for guests; Novotel has thirty three hotels in the UK. The world's tallest hotel is the 356m Gevora Hotel, built in 2017.
The UK hotel industry is worth £16bn. Travelodge has 595 hotels with 11 in Ireland, with around 12,000 employees, and in 2022 it turned over around £910m. Premier Inn has about 850 hotels, with 83,500 rooms, and a revenue of £2.5bn.
Amanda Willmott had founded two pubs in Birmingham - Carpe Diem and Quo Vadis; this design formed the template for her new design of female-friendly pubs for Bass Inns, known as All Bar One, in February 1994, which first opened in December 1994 in Sutton, London; she went on to form a similar chain Ha! Ha! Bar and Canteen, in 1998.
Eating out
Beefeater Steak Houses were one of the first chains of restaurants, first opening in July 1974 in Enfield, London; in 1974 its most popular meal was prawn cocktail, rump steak, followed by Black Forest gateau and two glasses of LiebfraumilchGerman wine; by 1995 it was Britain's largest restaurant chain, with 270 outlets, serving 15 million people per year.[8]
The 1990 Food Safety Act was the biggest change since 1938. It was introduced due to rising cases in listeria in cooked chilled chicken products. It replaced the Food Act 1984. Prisons, civil service buildings and military bases would now have their kitchens inspected by local environmental health officers, which had not regularly happened before. There had been recent salmonella outbreaks in NHS hospitals. All food outlets would now have to be registered with local authorities. Environmental health officers could instantly close down restaurants, without needing to obtain a court order. Restaurant owners could be fined £20,000 and jailed for six months by local magistrates.[9]
The Food Safety (General Food Hygiene) Regulations 1995 were introduced on 15 September 1995, which implemented the European Food Hygiene Directive 93/43/EEC.
The Food Information Regulations 2014 brought in the necessity for businesses to display the 14 allergens. This originated from the European FIC Regulation of December 2014, the Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011.
Between 12-17 March 1984, British Airways had a salmonella outbreak on long-haul flights to North America, the Middle East, and East Africa, affecting 631 passengers and 135 staff on 14 flights, including the businessman Peter de Savary, giving him a week in hospital, and on Concorde flights. No flight deck staff were affected, as the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, by common practice, never had the same food as passengers. After the earlier Japan Air Lines food poisoning incident, in February 1975, the 52 year old catering manager of Inflight Catering Company, at Anchorage, had committed suicide.[10] Most onboard the 1975 flight were Japanese Coca-Cola salesmen and their wives, who were being rewarded by their company with a visit to France.[11] At the stopover at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, ham and cheese omelettes had been brought onboard for breakfast, which made 196 passengers ill, on the flight from Tokyo to France. This 1975 incident is the reason why airline pilots and co-pilots do not eat the same food as the passengers.[12][13] Prof Stanley Mohlers and Kenneth N. Beers of Wright State University Medical School in Dayton, Ohio believed that food poisoning was an untrivial risk for airline crew[14]
19 January 1991, at a McDonald's restaurant in Preston in Lancashire, 14 people contract E. coli O157. This strain produced verocytotoxin,[15] so on 15 February 1991, McDonald's announced that it would cook its burgers for longer, across the whole of the UK[16]
In 2015 the UK hospitality industry employed around 2.9m people – around 9% of the UK workforce. By employment, it is the UK's fourth-largest industry. The most jobs in the industry are found in London (around 500,000) and South East England (around 400,000); 18% of workers in the UK industry are in London. There are around 1.5m restaurant workers, and around 0.5m work in hotels.
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