In a heroic effort to stabilise and build their business, Hollywood Bowl has successfully gained £30m investment via share placing.
The vision for Hollywood Bowl is to use the investment to facilitate the planned opening of new centres, refurbish existing venues and expand its Puttstars concept.
Often located in high-footfall leisure and retail developments on the end of towns, Hollywood Bowl venues are easily recognisable. Their American themed restaurants, licensed bars, amusement arcade and at least 12 lanes of bowling make Hollywood Bowl a favourite for families looking for affordable indoor fun or friends wanting a night out with a competitive twist. The company are hopeful of a strong performance when venues are permitted to reopen (hopefully on 17th May), following the positive experience of last summer, when the majority of their sites traded at full capacity at weekends and during the holidays.
Hollywood Bowl has an existing pipeline of seven new ten-pin bowling sites with a further nine centres going through the legal process. They hope that the recent investment will enable them to open three of the new sites by the end of 2021, at a cost of around £2.4m per site.
In preparation for the post-lockdown reopening refurbishments at Stevenage and Basildon are due to be completed. With work also being done at both sites in Glasgow, Liverpool and Cheltenham during 2021.
Greg Johnson at Shore Capital commented: ‘Unsurprisingly, the pandemic is creating additional opportunities for ten-pin bowling and mini-golf in “prime” locations in the UK. We see mini-golf, through its new Puttstars concept, as especially attractive (given flexibility) as more sites become available.’
It is this optimism which will see the expansion of Puttstars, the mini-golf arm of the Hollywood Bowl brand, currently available in Leeds, Rochdale and York.
As the whole industry gears up for the 17th May and Boris’ final go ahead, we celebrate the bold endeavour of Hollywood Bowl and look forward to joining the rest of the country on the lanes come the summer.
