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Premier Inn has become the latest target of easyGroup’s wide-ranging efforts to enforce trademarks through the courts, as Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s company challenged Britain’s biggest hotel chain over its “Rest easy” branding.
Lawyers for easyGroup told the High Court in London on Tuesday that Premier Inn’s wide use of the term on signage and in marketing campaigns risked confusing consumers and eroding the value of its brands.
Premier Inn’s legal team hit back, accusing easyGroup at the start of the week-long civil trial of trying to monopolise an “ordinary English word”. EasyGroup, whose brands include budget airline easyJet and others such as easyCar and easyCruise, has brought a series of lawsuits against a range of companies over alleged infringement of its trademarks in recent years.
Premier Inn is a particularly high-profile target, with more than 840 hotels across the UK. EasyGroup argues that the hotel chain, owned by the Whitbread group, has infringed three registered trademarks — easyHotel, easy and Rest Easy Apartments.
The court heard that Premier Inn had adopted the words “Rest easy” in its branding in 2021 to convey a message of “safety and reassurance” to consumers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Emma Himsworth KC, representing the company, described easyGroup in written arguments as a “serial litigant” that had “brought a large number of claims” in a “largely unsuccessful attempt to secure a monopoly in the word ‘easy’”.
“The phrase ‘Rest easy’ is ubiquitous,” she said. “It has been used in the English public vernacular for at least two centuries,” including in publications such as the Lady’s Magazine and the Financial Times, Himsworth added.
She said Premier Inn “did not intend to take any advantage” of easyGroup brands, and “never intended to imitate, copy, or otherwise reference” them.
Himsworth also maintained that there was “no likelihood of confusion” between easyGroup’s Rest Easy Apartments and the Premier Inn signs. “Apartments and hotels do not provide the same offering.”
Simon Malynicz KC, representing easyGroup, said it was “nonsense” to claim the company, which was founded by Haji-Ioannou, was making “an illegitimate attempt to monopolise the ordinary dictionary or descriptive word”.
“Anyone is free to use the word ‘easy’ in the way that nature intended: descriptively, as an adjective in a phrase or otherwise,” he said in written arguments.
“What they are not permitted to do is what Premier Inn have done here: purport to be making descriptive use whilst at the same time using it as part of the main branding by the company, so that it acquires trademark significance in the same way that ‘Every Little Helps’ by Tesco or ‘Just Do It’ by Nike has.”
He added: “No business has the right to confuse the public, damage the brands of another, or obtain without investment or payment the benefit that another business has created for itself.”
