Sébastien Bazin travel tips

Net room growth is a key metric for any hotel group, but one which Accor assures it is growing with caution. Its CEO Sebastien Bazin said that developing new hotels comes with environmental consequences the industry cannot ignore, but that in the end, new hotels are often good news for any destination.

“Ninety percent of the success of hotel companies is linked to two things – demography and emerging middle class,” Accor chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin said at the recent hospitality conference, HICSA 2024. This is especially true for India, he said, which has accounted for 25% of the emerging middle class in the past 10 years.

French hospitality company Accor signed a record 11 hotels in India last year and opened six properties, it said in a statement released on Thursday. 

These organizational changes will be effective as of 1 January 2024.

Accor said on Thursday it would appoint Gilda Perez-Alvarado as CEO of Orient Express, its luxury hotel brand, effective January 1.

Tel Aviv-headquartered Brown Hotels saw evacuees and stranded travelers pour into many of its rooms at its 24 hotels in Israel in the aftermath of brutal attacks on Saturday.

Caesars Palace Dubai is closing its doors, with Dubai Holding now choosing Accor instead. A phased rebranding will follow and by November of this year, the property will become Banyan Tree Dubai. With Caesars Entertainment detaching itself from Dubai – even after the country announced a gaming authority – Banyan Tree and Ennismore will co-operate the rebranded hotel.

Within the Hotel & Hospitality division of the company, Gilda has amassed close to twenty years of expertise, delivering high-level strategic guidance to key players in the industry.

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.

Executives at Accor, Europe’s largest hotel operator with about 5,445 hotels worldwide, envy how U.S.-based hotel operators have consolidated North America. But they argue they have a better sense of the ground game for hospitality in the rest of the world.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, June 7. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Hotel bookings will continue to boom despite inflation. A lack of hotel construction is giving pricing power to existing hotels. At the same time, rising demand from corporate group events and international travelers from China and India are tailwinds supporting the sector.

Accor plans to open more than 1,200 hotels in the next five years, thus increasing the number of its resorts by more than one-fifth, Europe’s biggest hotel group said on Tuesday as part of its capital markets day.

Accor reported on Thursday a profit surge in the first half of the year that it mainly credited to pricing its hotel rooms above inflationary operational costs. Demand swelled across regions and property types.

Asked point blank if International Airlines Group, the owner of British Airways and Iberia, saw any declines in airfares or travel demand, CEO Luis Gallego was blunt. “We don’t see that,” he said.