Accor CEO Defends Hotel Giant's Latest Reorg

25.08.2023 - 14:15 / skift.com / Sean Oneill / Sébastien Bazin

Accor put in place the pieces for a corporate re-organization this month. But this re-org is one of a few over the roughly decade-long reign of Sébastien Bazin, chairman and CEO. The latest changes have prompted some eye-rolling from analysts at investment banks and executives at competitor hotel giants.

Bazin defended the changes as necessary at the $7 billion Paris-based hotel conglomerate to stay abreast of an evolving market during an interview with Skift on Monday at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS) in Los Angeles.

“So the financial analysts don’t like it because they have to change their models,” Bazin said. “My competitors are barking about it because they see it coming and I’m not sure they like it that much. But to me it’s super-clear. We’re getting focused in the right way.”

Bazin, group deputy CEO Jean-Jacques Morin, and their team saw that Accor’s lifestyle and luxury brands were a critical growth area for the company even though they currently represent a minority of the total rooms under Accor’s umbrella. They decided around July to make sure that the execution of the business strategy for Accor’s lifestyle and luxury brands was clear, fast-tracked, and coordinated.

“You can’t expect a boss in Europe to cover 46 brands scattered worldwide with the same level of expertise,” Bazin said. “When you have Qataris owning a billion-dollar asset like a Raffles in Paris and other owners having an [economy brand like] Ibis, allocating the same time for each of them is ridiculous.”

In October, Accor’s management began to split the company into two groups.

One group focuses on “luxury and lifestyle,” including the brands Raffles and Orient Express; Fairmont; Sofitel; the soft brand collections MGallery, Emblems, and Handwritten Collection; and the Ennismore joint-venture. This group will be very “brand-led,” with the creation of CEOs for four major “brand pillars.” In recent weeks, Accor has named a handful of executives to lead the luxury and lifestyle brands, including this month’s decision to appoint Omer Acar as CEO of Raffles and Orient Express, a new position, effective March 1.

This isn’t Accor’s first time at the re-org game. In 2014, it began re-organizing the corporate office to reflect a changing company moving from owning a lot of real estate toward an asset-light model. In 2015, it began a parallel re-org as it expanded from primarily having hotels based in Europe that were heavily in the economy-end of the scale to having a global presence with a full range of offerings. During the pandemic, the company reorganized again in response to the severe disruptions to staffing and operations.

All of the changes were real. Accor went from having about 10 brands in 2014 to having