Premier Inn expansion plans

Well-known hotel operator Premier Inn plans to open five new hotels in Scotland this year (2020.) This is part of its £70 million expansion plans for the UK as a whole, for 37 hotels this year and 4,000 rooms in total.

These new sites include a 60-bed hotel in Aviemore, an 85-bed hotel in Thurso and a 96-bed hotel in Hamilton. Much larger premises are planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh, with a supersize 249-bed building planned in Glasgow and 136-bed for Edinburgh. In total, Premier Inn plans to add 735 beds in total, including both new sites and extension of existing site capacity.

It is hoped that this expansion will result in the creation of 200 more jobs.

Premier Inn managing director Simon Ewins said: “We’re gearing up for an exciting year in Scotland with a variety of new hotels ranging from a 249-bed mega-hotel in one of Glasgow’s most iconic central locations to our most Northerly site in the UK in Thurso.

 “From its world-class cities to jaw-dropping Highlands, Scotland’s tourist offer is hard-to-beat and we’re pleased to help make it even easier for both leisure and business travellers to enjoy the country affordably”.

The hotel industry employs a diverse mix of casual, temporary, agency, part time and full-time permanent staff in order to staff the hotel around the clock. If there was ever an industry which suffers from still using paper timesheets to record working hours, it is this one.

Keeping track of shifts, especially on night shifts or other times when the manager isn’t around, is very difficult with high volumes of staff using timesheets. Employees regularly forget to hand in their timesheets by the deadline and agency staff hand theirs straight to their agencies, meaning that sometimes the employer never even sees it to approve it.

This means that there is a very real danger of employees falsifying their timesheets; either just by a few minutes here and there, or outright claiming shifts they were never present for.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance Scotland will solve these authorisation issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

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