Chris Benfield
BUTLINS made a move away from hi-de-hi yesterday by opening a hotel promising "unparalleled levels of service, style and quality" in "contemporary and sophisticated accommodation".
The launch of the Shoreline Hotel, on the edge of one of the three remaining Butlins complexes, at Bognor Regis in West Sussex, is a move upmarket for a company built on holidays as cheap as chips.
The hotel is billed as a new venture for Butlins. And in some ways, it might be – not least because smoking is forbidden throughout. But as Yorkshire knows, it is not the first Butlins hotel.
The fading glories of the Grand at Scarborough were run by Butlins for 20 years, but sold on in 1998.
By then, Butlins had been in retreat on all fronts for some time. Its only Yorkshire holiday camp, at Filey, closed in 1983. Most of the rest of the empire that made Billy Butlin one of Britain's first working-class millionaires was sold off in the years before and after his death in 1980, and it dropped its handful of standalone hotels as part of a relaunch at the end of the 1990s.
Butlins was left with just three camps, which it prefers to call "resorts" – at Skegness, Lincolnshire; Minehead, Somerset; and Bognor Regis. But those still get 1.3 million visitors a year between them.
If the Bognor experiment works out, each camp will be equipped with a hotel.
A Butlins spokesman said yesterday: "It's part of our evolution. First-time visitors, in particular, want a hotel-type environment they recognise and understand."
All the rooms include bunks for children, wide-screen TV with DVD player and games console, and en-suite bathroom.
High-season prices start at £79 a night for a family of four staying at least three nights (room only).
The best rooms, known as Nelson's Staterooms, and costing £20 a night more, include facilities such as private balconies, "fluffy bathrobes" and a telescope for staring out to sea.
The traditional chalets/
apartments come in a similar range, but 10-15 per cent cheaper.
The hotel will not have any of the red-coated cheerleaders who were affectionately satirised in the TV series Hi-De-Hi. But guests will be able to buy day passes for the neighbouring camp, where the usual Butlins amusements and cabarets are available for £15 a day for adults and £7.50 for children.
Nowadays, on the instructions of the marketing consultants, the diversions very definitely do not include knobbly knees competitions and mother-in-law jokes. The Bognor programme this summer boasts a cultural mix including kung-fu displays from Tibet and acrobats from Kenya. But there are still redcoats organising singalongs and tea.
The operations director of Butlins, Richard Bates, said yesterday: "The accommodation is breathtaking and there are few hotels that can boast a 100-strong entertainment team a stone's throw away."
chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk

Facts behind the fortune
n Billy Butlin, a fairground entrepreneur from Canada born in 1899, started to make his fortune by bringing dodgems (or "bumper cars") to Britain, in 1923.
n He set up his first holiday camp in 1936 at Skegness, followed by one at Clacton in 1938, and started one at Filey in 1939. He made money all through the Second World War by renting his chalets to the Army.
n The post-war leisure boom made him a millionaire, with additional camps at Ayr in Scotland, Barry Island and Pwllheli in Wales, and Mosney in Ireland.
n The grave of an African elephant, which once roamed the camp grounds, still marks the Filey site.