THIS is what the UK’s first hotel school will look like, after councillors gave the scheme their unanimous backing.

Long-standing proposals to build a hotel and hotel training school on a prime Bournemouth town centre site adjacent to the BIC have now won planning approval.

The developers were forced to go back to the drawing board after their original designs were slammed for being too bulky, overbearing and unsympathetic to its surroundings.

But their second attempt was far more successful, with councillors praising the developers for taking their advice and giving them the green light to proceed.

Cllr David Kelsey, chair of Bournemouth’s planning board, said: “I did give the developers an exceptionally hard time when they came to us for the first time.

“But this time I had to say to them that I was really pleased that they had gone away and listened to everything we had said. They came back with a first-class presentation of a much more acceptable scheme.

“It looked like a garden greenhouse before, it was a boring square design, too big and out of keeping with the Royal Exeter Hotel.

“Now we have something with a few curves in it, it’s stylish, the proposed materials are good, it just looks so much better.”

The new scheme has been reduced so the hotel contains 200 bedrooms, compared to the 229 it had before. The scheme also proposed 221 car park spaces for the hotel and 105 public car parking spaces as an extension of the BIC car park. The developers have also agreed to clad the BIC car park in the same materials as the hotel.