"I then fly back, fly to Paris for another board meeting, come back and drive to Devon, where I'm chairman of the board of governors at my old school. I hope it's not always going to be like that."
In between the duties of his non-executive directorships – at Dubai hotel group Jumeirah and Kesa Group, owner of Comet electrical stores – Parker also plans to realise his life-long ambition of sailing across the Atlantic.
He'll do that in stages, but it could take a while if he realises his remaining corporate ambition, which is to use his six years' experience as chief executive to become chairman of a large, UK-quoted company.
There should be no shortage of offers. When Parker was promoted from running Whitbread's hotels division in 2004, sceptics bemoaned the appointment and urged a corporate break-up.
Six years on, Parker has delivered a total return of 147pc, with Whitbread shares increasing 107pc, compared with a 29pc rise in the FTSE100 index.
Last week, the company, 268 years old, announced a 28pc increase in underlying interim pre-tax profits, which was boosted by strong growth at Costa Coffee, the UK's largest coffee shops chain, and Premier Inn, Britain's biggest budget hotels business.
Whitbread: Shares, news, charts
When Parker became chief executive Whitbread had 240 budget hotels (then called Travel Inns) and 346 Costa stores, including 40 overseas outlets. Now, there are 585 Premier Inns and 1,716 Costas.
"When I was appointed, the best thing that was said was that I was a safe pair of hands and a fast pair of legs," he says. "But nobody has built more hotels than us and no one has ever opened more coffee shops in this country.
"Profits have never gone down, even in the recession, contrary to any other quoted hotel and restaurant company that I know of. And we're still in real growth."
When Parker became CEO, Whitbread was a leisure conglomerate with 10 divisions, each with their own boards. Within weeks he spent ￡560m on Premier Lodge, which gave Whitbread more than half of the UK budget hotels market.
Nine months later, he sold the four and five-star Marriott UK franchise, which he had bought as head of Whitbread's hotels arm.
Disposals of restaurant chains TGI Friday and Pizza Hut followed, along with Whitbread's stake in soft-drinks group Britvic.
Then Parker pulled off the ￡925m sale of David Lloyd Leisure in August 2007 – weeks before the credit marketed seized up. All this didn't silence his critics however.
"Six years ago, it was all about the break-up of Whitbread," he recalls. "It was a conglomerate that didn't add any value to its individual businesses and therefore they would be better standing alone.
"People said: 'Why on earth are you bothering with all these coffee shops? Surely you're not the right person to run them.'
"Then, if you go back three years, people were saying: 'Why do you own all this property?' The previous managements of some of our contemporaries for whatever reason decided to leverage their balance sheets.
"Now people are saying: 'Didn't you do well? Didn't you make the right decision?'"
Parker says that, having sold its beer and tenanted pubs operations, Whitbread had lost its "heart and soul" when he became chief executive. A question often asked in the financial pages was: "What is Whitbread for?"
"Internally there was a bit of a vacuum and externally there was a burning platform of survival," he says.
His approach was to elevate Whitbread from its long-running status as a "cost-of-capital company" that was only just delivering returns above its cost of capital.
That dictated the exits.
On the other hand, Costa, which Whitbread had bought for ￡20m in 1995, boasted returns on capital of 30pc. "I saw Starbucks and thought there was room for two," he says. "Six years ago there were the three ugly sisters of Starbucks, Nero and Costa and now we're bigger than both of them combined in the UK.
"I'm absolutely convinced that nobody could have run and developed Costa better than us. If it had been in private equity hands, it would have been flipped at least twice and it would not be of the size or profitability that it is today.
"It's number one in the UK and has just had a 55pc increase in profits. We've grown the international business to just under 600 stores. Private equity would not have done that."
However, Parker admits there was a moment of realisation in his first month that he was in the hot seat now and it was all down to him. Did the pressure ever get to him?
"No," he says firmly. "It's water off a duck's back. That's one of the things you learn being the chief executive of a big company. If you don't have a thick skin when you start, you certainly have one when you finish – or you don't survive. I think we can make running businesses over- complicated. The key issues are all about having the right strategy, getting the right people around you and having the ability to orchestrate.
"It's not an accident that Whitbread today is in value for money brands. These are fundamental tough decisions we took."
Indeed, the budget nature of Whitbread's hotels makes Parker confident that Whitbread, under incoming chief executive Andy Harrison, can weather Britain's austerity climate.
He's broadly happy with last week's Spending Review and doesn't think public sector cuts and job losses will mean that Costa's customers will cut back on their skinny lattes.
"There are no signs in our business of any double-dip recession or negative impact of the cuts at the moment," he says. "In terms of Costa, the market reaction has been outstanding. We've had 34 consecutive quarters of like-for-like sales growth. We offer 25 minutes in a safe, secure, well-maintained, warm environment with a choice of quality food and that's seen as value for money in this day and age. I think we're in a very good place for this age of austerity. With our hotels and restaurants, the market is coming towards us.
"People in large companies are moving out of full service hotels and seeing the value that we operate at. It's one of the reasons we're had an increase in occupancy from 70pc to 79pc this year."
Whitbread is planning more customer initiatives to follow the success of its Costa Coffee Club loyalty scheme, which launched in March and has already achieved three times its target of 1m members.
Costa also plans to have 3,000 stores – 1,600 in the UK and 1,400 abroad – by 2015 and Premier Inn aims to expand from 42,000 UK rooms to 55,000 by 2014.
"Yum Brands, which owns KFC and Pizza Hut, has 3,500 branches in China," says Parker. "We have 71, so there's a huge opportunity. Starbucks doesn't have anything in India, where we do. They have a little bit in Russia. And we're bigger than them in Central Europe and the Middle East."
With Premier Inn, Whitbread has also tested overseas markets, with a hotel in Bangalore, India, two more being built in Pune and Delhi, three in Dubai, one in Abu Dhabi and another in Qatar.
However, Parker believes the UK, where Premier Inn still has only 7pc of the nation's hotel rooms, will continue to be the main focus.
An alternative to organic growth would be the acquisition of rival Travelodge but Parker walked away from a ￡900m deal to buy the chain in 2008 and thinks a bid is now unlikely. "We've looked at Travelodge seriously on a couple of occasions," he says. "You never say 'never' but I think the focus for us now is very much on organic building. We want nice modern, new, well-located hotels and we don't have a strategy of making a large chain acquisition. But, of course, if the price is right, we'd have to consider it."
Born in London to parents who ran a café near Arsenal's old ground in Highbury, north London, Parker worked there from the age of 10.
After university, he worked for the hotel businesses of Truman, and Scottish & Newcastle Breweries before joining Bass, where he went to Brussels and Frankfurt as senior vice-president for Holiday Inn Worldwide.
He joined Whitbread in 1992, just after its chief executive, Peter Jarvis, had told his senior managers that the hotels business was the only part of the company he was ashamed of.
Parker bought Marriott's 16 UK hotels and converted Whitbread's 12 Country Clubs hotels to the marque, sold the 50-strong Lansbury coaching inns chain and began building up Travel Inn, which had just 24 hotels when he arrived. Now he's moving out of UK hotels for the first time in his career. "I'm a child of the industry," he says.
"For me to have had the opportunity of being chief executive and creating in the UK this number one hospitality company would have been my parents' wildest dream."
So what's his dream now, beyond that cross-Atlantic trip? Watch this space is all he will say. We will.
Alan Parker CV
Age: 63
Widower with two grown-up children
Lives: London
Car: Lexus
Favourite books: Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy
Interests: Arsenal FC, sailing – owns a 56ft yacht called Oyster Reach
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