Accor Redefines Soft Brand Potential With New Handwritten Collection

25.08.2023 - 14:18 / skift.com / Sean Oneill / With New

Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, will reveal on Thursday a new global “soft” brand, Handwritten Collection, featuring so-called lifestyle hotels. These mid-priced properties have funky furniture and buzzy restaurants and bars but don’t offer the full services of a premium boutique.

Handwritten Collection’s first two hotels are Hotel Shanghai Sheshan Oriental, Handwritten Collection, which officially switched from being a Sofitel on Thursday, and Le Saint Gervais Hotel & Spa in Saint Gervais, France. A few more properties — in Australia and France — aim to join to the collection by May.

Accor said it has a dozen “secured signings” and a pipeline of “leads” with interested partners reflecting about 100 properties.

Handwritten Collection aims to appeal to owners of lifestyle hotelsby letting them tap into Accor’s loyalty program — which can drive a lot of direct bookings that are typically more profitable for a hotel than reservations made through online travel agencies.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen that a lot of independent boutique hotel owners are longing for support from big groups such as Accor in reaching customers around the world without losing their identity and personality and characteristics that they have put in their blood, sweat, and tears over many years to achieve,” Alex Schellenberger, group chief brand officer.

Roughly 80 percent of these deals will be conversions, with the rest new construction, Schellenberger said.

Soft brands like Handwritten Collection involve fewer rules, or “standards,” from the Paris-based headquarters of Accor than hard brands. Accor in 2021 added a soft brand for the luxury category called Emblems, which it positioned between hard brands Sofitel and Fairmont in terms of amenities and service. For over a decade Accor has had MGallery, a soft brand for boutique hotels — now numbering about 100.

Soft-branded collections have been around since 2008 with the launch of Choice’s Ascend Hotel Collection.

Other hotel groups have pursued similar strategies. For example, Hyatt in 2018 bought boutique hotel company Two Roads Hospitality for $280 million. The deal included the brands Alila, Destination, Joie de Vivre, Thompson, and Tommie. It created the JdV by Hyatt brand as a soft-branded collection of boutiques. In October, the company said it would fold in most of the 5,500 rooms in Germany’s Lindner Hotels to JdV by Hyatt.

What’s notable about Accor’s Handwritten Collection is that it showcases properties with the market segmentation called midscale. They’re at a middle point in a spectrum of amenities and decor that range from the simplicity of budget properties to the pinnacle of four-star resorts.

From a guest perspective, the properties would be