THERE is a dinosaur in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel on London’s Park Lane. A gorgosaurus, cousin of tyrannosaurus rex, looms over the bar and peers down at the guests sipping drinks.

I wonder if the prehistoric monster is somehow symbolic. Critics think that Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) the world’s biggest hotelier, is a bit of a dinosaur. Its brands — Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and, of course, Intercontinental itself — were exciting in the 1970s, when standardised hotels were a welcome novelty for business travellers.

These days the fashion is for boutique and different. And many hotels seem to be having a terrible time, with businesses and consumers tightening their belts and staying away in droves.

I will put this point to Andy Cosslett with some care. The Manchester-born boss of IHG is imposing — a tall, broad-shouldered former rugby player. Having come up through the tough management programmes at Unilever and Cadbury, he has a reputation for straight talking. For once the line about British hoteliers and Basil Fawlty doesn’t fit.

Let’s start with the economic downturn leaving hotels empty. Cosslett snorts. Media exaggeration, he says. “You go to the airports, and they’re chock-a-block. The roads are chock-a-block. Here we are in London; we’re busy, we’re full. The US tourists are being replaced.

“We have new travellers. Ten years ago we didn’t have the Russians coming or the Poles or the Uzbeks or people from India.Middle East travellers are back in force in London. The euro has been strong, so more Europeans are coming over.

“I’m a frequent flyer and it doesn’t seem to be getting any quieter to me. Our petrol was £2 a gallon, it’s now more than £4, but have you tried driving up the A40 this morning? People are making trade-offs as they’re getting squeezed. They’re doing different things, buying different things, but what they don’t appear to be doing is stopping travelling.”

Given his plain speaking, it’s probably just as well Cosslett turned down an opportunity to join the Foreign Office after he left Manchester University. Instead he joined Unilever as a trainee in 1979.

He scored an early success there with Viennetta, the ice-cream dessert that was an unexpected 1980s top-seller. “I didn’t invent it, but my first real job in Wall’s Ice Cream was product manager for Viennetta. It was the first ice-cream dessert to be patented. Bejam [the defunct frozen food retailer] tried to launch its own version called Encore — we took them to court and won. Viennetta was impossibly successful for four or five years. My name’s on the patent but I don’t get any royalties,” he rues.

After 11 years at Unilever, where one of his fellow trainees was Tim Mason, now heading Tesco’s US business, Cosslett moved to Cadbury, the confectioner, where he spent 14 years, running the UK and Asia-Pacific operations at various times.

Cosslett radiates self-assuredness, a trait that might be explained by his teenage years. His parents divorced when he was in his mid-teens. His mother moved out and his father, a qualified accountant, was often away travelling, leaving the younger Cosslett to run the home. “I was doing more around the house, doing my share of the cooking, washing and ironing — helping to run the home.”

He laughs politely when I suggest that neither of his parents could accuse him of treating the house like a hotel. “It made me very self-sufficient. It’s important in business, it marks you out. As a young man, I never worried about making decisions or about taking a risk because you become confident in yourself that you can do things.”