Best Western Hotels rolling out EV charging points in the UK

Best Western Hotels – a chain of independently run hotels in the UK – are fitting electric car charging points in their hotel car parks.

We’re electric car sceptics – or at least sceptical about their ability to replace the ICE car as our principal form of personal transport – although EVs do have their place as runarounds in urban areas, where their limited range isn’t really a factor.

But taking your EV off for a weekend jaunt does pose logistical problems when the average range is probably no more than 80 miles, and something worth making the effort for a weekend away is almost always going to be further away than that.

But a bit of smart marketing by Best Western Hotels – a group of 270 or so independently run hotels round the UK – means EV drivers will soon be able to plot their weekend away on the basis of Best Western Hotels en route, with Best Western planning on fitting EV charging points in their car parks, with half their hotels having free charging points by September.

Best Western boss, Angela Burns, said:

There are currently some 10,000 electric car users on UK roads but that really is the tip of the iceberg – there will, according to the latest Department of Transport figures, be 1.2 million e-cars on UK roads by 2020.

Make no mistake, what we are seeing now is very much the first wave of a movement which is set to become huge over the next decade. As a company that is forward thinking it is only right that Best Western is at the vanguard of this advance towards greener transport.

We might take issue with Angela’s figures on the number of EVs on UK roads, and the guesstimates of the DoT, but we applaud the logic and marketing nous of Best Western in making longer EV journeys a more practical proposition – and grabbing EV owners and their families as guests in the process.