InterContinental Hotels shrugged off the effects of the global credit squeeze and signed up close on 20,000 new rooms in the first quarter of 2008.

This boosted the group's overall pipeline to 231,553 rooms - the equivalent of 1,720 hotels - with the bulk of the growth coming in the Americas, where over 15,000 rooms were agreed in the three months to the end of March.

"The credit crunch has had very little impact on our business," chief executive Andrew Cosslett said. "There has been a lot written about it in the press, but it hasn't affected our ability to do business and sign-up new customers."

Since the credit crunch first took hold last October, the group has opened 190 hotels and signed up over 400 into its development pipeline.

"This has been a record period for new signings and gives the group the biggest pipeline of hotels development in the industry," Mr Cosslett continued.

Some analysts had been concerned that tighter global credit conditions could have put a brake on InterContinental's hotel development programme as its franchisees and third party developers found it increasingly more difficult to raise cash in the current environment. There were also worries that a slowing US economy could impact occupancies and growth rates. The group derives over 70 per cent of its revenues from the US.

InterContinental, owners of Holiday Inn, reported a pretax profit of pounds 42 million for the first quarter down from pounds 56 million a year earlier, on revenue of pounds 226 million up from pounds 196 million.

Before exceptionals relating to the costs of the relaunch of the Holiday Inn brand, pretax profit grew to pounds 47 million from pounds 40 million.

Intercontinental's revenue per room growth for the quarter was 3.5 per cent, despite being hit by the timing of Easter.

Total gross revenue from all hotels in the group was pounds 2.2 billion, up ten per cent.

There were strong performances from the EMEA region - Europe, Middle East and Africa - with London doing particularly well as wealthy Middle East tourists boosted by the soaring price of oil visited the capital.

Asia Pacific, too, saw good growth with China starting to build ahead of the Beijing Olympics later this year. China is a key area for investment with 125 hotels targeted by the end of 2008.