Accor’s Top Digital Exec Exposes Data on Its Hotel Tech

Skift Take

Accor’s chief digital officer, Alix Boulnois, has been enhancing the hotel giant’s tech game. Her in-depth information covers how any hotel company might utilize tech to drive commitment, sell subscriptions, and disperse rooms.

Sean O’Neill

Accor held a day of presentations for investors on June 27, and I wrote a piece covering 7 leading slides from it. Today I wish to highlight the most noteworthy 20 minutes of the 6 hours of talks.

Alix Boulnois, chief digital officer, exposed how Accor is enhancing its digital foundations.

• Previously this year, Boulnois signed up with Accor’s management board. The relocation underscored her importance at the Paris-based group, which runs 5,400 hotels and whose brands consist of Raffles, Fairmont, Ibis, and Novotel.
• Before joining Accor a few years back, Boulnois spent seven years at Amazon, where one of her projects was to launch Prime Now grocery delivery.
• “I spent most of my career with huge tech guys in the U.S., and they have a special method to work and manage their groups– to deliver options and systems,” Boulnois said. “This is truly what my leadership team has actually been trained to implement within this organization.”
• She was previously an expert at McKinsey. (Aren’t they all?)

Accor introduced what it calls a “digital factory” at the end of 2021. What the heck is that?

• The unit unites about 800 developers, information experts, item supervisors, customer relationship professionals, and others to tackle the issues of hotel guests and operators.
• “Accor has the only digital factory at scale in the hospitality industry,” Boulnois said.
• Boulnois has led this group to have a Silicon Valley mindset towards development.
• For example, guests had a problem quickly making and burning points in the hotel group’s loyalty program. So the digital factory created an ALL-Accor Live Unlimited payment card, thanks to a combination with tech company Fever. The card lets visitors collect points on all purchases at Accor-affiliated properties, such as a meal at a restaurant, a medical spa see, a co-working visit, or an over night hotel stay. Guests can use the card to pay for services or book concert tickets through sales partners.
• D-Edge, a hotel marketing services unit for other hotel companies, is under the digital factory umbrella. It’s relatively uncommon for openly held hotel groups to have a tech subsidiary. Only Choice Hotels has one, SkyTouch. D-Edge also handles The Accor Reservation System (TARS), the home management system utilized by the majority of the business’s economy hotels.
• The team is working to level up its client relationship management. The goal is to improve how it tracks, and makes use of, data on visitors as they stay throughout different brand names in different countries scheduled through different methods.
• A small part of the group works on dreamier, long-lasting development concentrating on social and environmental obligation. One project is Fullsoon, a start-up Accor developed to anticipate dining establishment tenancy rates to minimize food waste.

Accor, like its competitors, wishes to sell more than simply spaces.

• Within the past year, it’s released “All Food”– websites and apps for scheduling meals at its dining establishments– in choose markets, such as France.
• In April, it released Health club d’Accor for bookings in France, with plans to go into other markets.

Alix Boulnois, primary digital officer at Accor, speaking at Capital Markets Day in June 2023. Source: Accor. Distribution is a challenge for all hoteliers. They all wish to sell to more guests using the least expensive sources possible.

• Considering that 2019, Accor has actually expanded its circulation channels by 27% to more than 140. In specific, Accor has been supplementing international online travel agencies like Expedia with more local partners and agencies in Southeast Asia, China, and Latin America.
• The group has actually improved the business’s mobile apps. Customer ratings of the apps are now in between 4.6 out of 5 stars and 4.8 out of 5 stars across its Apple and Android apps, about 20% much better compared with between 3 and 3.5 stars before the pandemic.
• The above two elements have actually helped Accor expand its share of direct bookings, which are typically cheaper for Accor than third-party bookings. The share of direct bookings (such as through its mobile app) as a share of all distribution rose 3 portion points considering that 2019.
• Some of that direct development is app-based. Pre-crisis, Accor’s apps drove 18% of its direct reservation incomes. Now they drive 27%.
• In the past 12 months, the hotel group took pleasure in a speed of growth for direct reservations that was 4 portion points more than the speed of development it saw from online travel bureau. If you compared direct reservations development versus online travel agencies lumped with worldwide circulation systems such as Amadeus and Sabre, the business saw 7 portion points more development in direct bookings in the previous year. (Mentioning Amadeus and Sabre, Accor wishes to provide its special rates for loyalty members through those global distribution systems to enhance activity.)
• Visitors at the company’s luxury properties often expect high-touch service. (Fairmont drives about 12% of its service from contact centers.) Accor opened in December a brand-new contact center in Barcelona to assist.

Accor is leading its competitors on the subscription design.

• In March, Accor rolled out a membership program worldwide where guests can pay a yearly cost for discounts and benefits. It likewise added regional programs in China and Brazil. While other companies have provided methods to purchase higher levels of status in commitment programs for a long period of time, Accor has 5 subscription items, more than its rivals.
• “We are very bullish on memberships,” Boulnois said.
• Memberships create an income stream and boost direct bookings, saving the business marketing expenses and helping to subsidize the advantages and discounts.

Most of Accor’s brand websites are dated in look and performance, in my view.

• Boulnois stated she’s pushing for refreshed sites. Fairmont and Sofitel, amongst its high-end brands, will get contemporary websites soon.
• “We’re industrializing the design, which will enable us to launch increasingly more brand-new brand sites at an accelerated speed,” Boulnois stated.

Accor’s skill at setting space rates has actually been below par, in my view.

• An essential skill for any hotel company is “profits management,” or setting rates and making spaces available in reaction to signals in supply and demand. In my view, Accor has actually lagged the sector average among significant hotel groups.
• Boulnois stated her team is making the most recent income management software available to all of the company’s hotels with pertinent predictions depending upon brand, geography, and shifting macroeconomic conditions.

Loyalty programs are critical to hotel group development, and Accor has lagged gamers such as Marriott and Hilton in running a popular and lucrative benefits program.

• Collaborations are very important. Some guests want to earn or redeem miles with partners, such as rental car companies, airline companies, and taxi business. Pre-pandemic, Accor’s loyalty program had about 50 partners. Now it has two times that number, or 108. In one example, guests in numerous markets can now schedule use points to book tickets to live occasions through a partnership with Fever.
• Through a mix of program enhancements, rebranding, and heavy marketing, Accor promoted gains.
• The business grew membership in its commitment program by 40% since 2019, to 89 million members.
• Year-to-date registration in the program is up 107%.
• Mobile self-check-in is an appealing advantage that can help inspire loyalty sign-ups. Accor is at work having standardized tech throughout its hotel brand names to allow keyless entry.
• It prepares to offer more status match offers to tourists with high status in other travel programs as a cross-marketing tool.

Hotel companies need tidy and unified data to benefit from other tools and tricks.

• Like the majority of hotel business, Accor has a great deal of its consumer and hotel performance information siloed in different makers that do not talk to each other well. That makes complex information analysis.
• Boulnois knows this, coming from Amazon. Her team has actually settled a plan to move Accor completely into the cloud computing era.
• “We’ll bring all our information together in a clean style,” Boulnois stated.
• “We want to connect personally with our visitors in a synchronized style throughout all of our touchpoints,” Boulnois stated. “We have actually developed a really strong collaboration with Salesforce and Adobe on that front. The platforms are live, and we currently see substantial uplift, particularly in our marketing activations.”
• The business’s central reservation system, a core piece of innovation for accepting reservations, is “in the process of being replaced,” Boulnois stated, without offering information. Will it replace The Accor Reservation System (TARS) with something its tech company D-Edge develops? Or is going to go back to a partner like Sabre to revamp its central booking system?
• Moving systems from premise-based hardware to cloud-based platforms is vital.
• “Around 40% of our hotels will be on PMS [home management system] cloud by the first quarter of 2024,” Boulnois said. Accor’s total digital facilities has to do with half in the cloud already.
• “All of this will drive more speed, agility, and organization worth,” Boulnois stated.

How does Accor’s digital revamp compare to what else is in the market? Customers to Skift Research study can read the just-published Hotel Tech Benchmark: Digital Marketing and Advertising Tech 2023 report and the Hotel Tech Benchmark: Reservation Engines, Site Builders, and Direct Booking Tools 2023 report.

I constantly read pointers and feedback. Contact me at [email safeguarded] or through my LinkedIn profile.