For those who haven’t been
paying attention, AccorHotels through a recent series
of acquisitions has
been taking significant steps to expand its business beyond traditional hotel
stays. Revenues for its new businesses division more than doubled between the
first quarter and second quarter as a result of new additions, bringing the
division’s total revenue to €43 million for the first half of 2017.
But as Accor fosters ventures
like luxury home rentals via Onefinestay and concierge services from John Paul,
what do these new business areas mean for the company’s sales organization,
particularly from a B2B standpoint? SVP of Accor’s global sales organization
Markus Keller said there’s an underlying expectation that the team will eventually
contribute to the growth of these verticals.
“At the beginning of this
year one of our strategic challenges for the coming year…was agility,” Keller
told BTN. “Like all large companies with a legacy IT infrastructure … it's
quite hard to move the boundaries of the existing processes. But we have the
unique position where we are acquiring some of these non-hotel, but
hospitality-related verticals. Customers who are traditionally customers of
Fairmont or Sofitel could be customers of Onefinestay tomorrow or use the
services of Jean Paul, for instance. That is something that's on the table.”
Hotels, nevertheless, still
comprise Accor’s core business, Keller said, and that means sales needs to
focus on its existing role first and foremost. “We can't afford to drop the
ball on the business going into hotels," he said.
To manage the change
hitting the company with every new acquisition, Keller appointed a VP of sales
solutions for new business integration, whose role is to understand what the
organization’s commercial relationship is with Accor’s other business verticals
and to tackle the workflows of contracting, tracking, incentive plans,
payments, loyalty and how integration into the general sales process might
work. “Onefinestay is an obvious possibility; it’s got a great footprint in key
cities around the world with very high-end accommodation that could suit a
certain level of corporate client and a certain level of leisure client,”
Keller said. “But it’s not attached to the GDS, there’s a limited capability to
have real-time inventory—so there are some technical challenges we've got to
work through.”
Merging
Rental Platforms Under Onefinesta
Accor plans to move new
acquisitions Travel
Keys and Squarebreak under the single brand umbrella of
Onefinestay before the end of the year.
Accor previously owned a 49
percent stake in Paris-based Squarebreak, and will close its transaction to
purchase the entire company in the coming weeks. Travel Keys, an Atlanta-based
company that brokers rentals of private vacation homes, officially joined
Accor’s portfolio during the first quarter. The combination brings
Onefinestay’s systemwide property count to more than 10,000 homes. Accor has
appointed Javier Cedillo-Espin as CEO of Onefinestay.
Accor’s
Performance for Q2
Systemwide occupancy
increased 1.6 percentage points year over year on a like-for-like basis to 70.1
percent, while average daily rate rose 0.4 percent on a like-for-like basis to
€91.
In Europe, occupancy rose
1.5 percentage points to 64.9 percent and ADR increased 2.7 percent to €83. ADR
in France and Switzerland, however, declined 3.9 percent to €84, while
occupancy increased 2.6 percent to 71.9 percent. In the North American, Central
American and Caribbean region, occupancy fell 1.5 percentage points to 76.6
percent, but ADR increased 4 percent to €220. South America experienced
declines in both ADR, down 1.4 percent to €63, and occupancy, down 2.4
percentage points to 52.3 percent. In Asia/Pacific, ADR grew 2.2 percent to €80
and occupancy increased 1.9 percentage points to 67.9 percent. Finally, in the
Middle East and Africa region, ADR rose 1.6 percent to €133 and occupancy grew
2.6 percentage points to 59.4 percent.
The
company added 23,000 rooms during the first half of the year. As of June 30,
Accor had 597,132 rooms in its portfolio across 4,195 properties. It’s pipeline
stands at 167,000 rooms across 910 hotels, with the most significant room
growth pegged for the Asia/Pacific region with 74,000 rooms. Second-quarter
revenue rose 9.2 percent year over year on a like-for-like basis to €445
million.