Paris – AccorHotels CEO Sébastien Bazin elaborated on his strategy
behind opening up AccorHotels.com as a mixed marketplace on Wednesday at the Association
of Corporate Travel Executives global conference, saying he’s moving Accor from
being a hotel company to a travel company.
In June, the company announced
that select independent hotels would appear alongside Accor-branded hotels in
booking-query results on the company's website. “Whether you are a leisure
client or business client, 70 percent of those clients will go through at least
two websites before they're going to make a [booking] decision,” Bazin said. “We
launched the marketplace for one particular reason: If you want those 70
percent of people that are going on two websites before they make a booking,
you need to propose different offerings. My portfolio of hotels is not enough.”
Bazin said AccorHotels has been a “sleeping giant for far too
long,” allowing online travel agencies, aggregators and disruptors like Airbnb
to lead innovation the past 15 years. “The industry [is] not going through any
revolution; we're not going through any transformation. We did enter an
enormous mutation, which is irreversible, and it only started 12 to 15 years
ago.”
AccorHotels.com gets 280 million unique visitors annually, but Bazin
said that figure is made up of clients who visit the site three to four times a
year total. The online travel agencies, aggregators and disruptors, meanwhile,
have clients that visit their sites two to three times a week. He attributed the
higher volume of frequent visitors to technology, skill, youth, simplicity of
ideas and "viral effect." People visit such third-party platforms to
see what’s new and where they might be able to go, as well as to share unique
opportunities with their friends on social media. Bazin is using that thought
process to drive AccorHotels.com to be a destination website and do something
innovative for the company in the process.
Adding select independent hotels—which Accor chooses by star
ratings, location and TripAdvisor rankings—will rapidly expand its offering in
327 markets.
“Seventy percent of the hotel industry involves independent
mom-and-pops,” Bazin said. “If I have difficulty predicting the future, in knowing
where to put the money, an independent owner doesn't have the money and doesn't
have the technology. Why is it that a company like ours should not be addressing
those who have problems?”
Bazin also made it clear that AccorHotels will be competing with
OTAs, which he said are “suffocating” independent hoteliers with
ever-increasing commissions. Eleven independent hotels are available for booking
on AccorHotels.com, and 65 total have been signed. The company hopes to feature
10,000 independent properties on the platform by 2018.