News was made around the International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF) in Berlin this week with hotel companies taking advantage of the big gathering to make announcement and share updates on development.
HOTELS was at Accor events and sat down with, among others, Hyatt Hotels Corp. and Rosewood Hotels & Resorts to learn what’s new.
Accor: Accor CEO Sebastien Bazin updated press conference attendees on the French company’s continued redefinition into what he called an asset-light “ecosystem of augmented hospitality” – ownerships and partnerships with dozens of brands beyond simply hotels – and expanded on the recently announced Accor Live Limitless loyalty program, a lifestyle program not dependent on a member staying at a hotel.
Bazin and his team also delved more deeply into the company’s relaunched loyalty program, Accor Live Limitless, or ALL, combining its distribution platform and experiential loyalty program with two new tiers starting in January 2020 – diamond and black, an invitation-only tier whose details are still being fleshed out – with a new emphasis on rewards such as culinary experiences and festivals. Previously announced partnerships, including a shirt sponsorship with the Paris Saint Germain football club, were made earlier. It all adds up to a “total culture shift from real estate manager to service provider,” Bazin said.
Bazin also pointed to partnership revenue, which he said was “mediocre – it’s awful, and it’s time to wake up,” lagging by hundreds of millions of dollars behind his biggest American competitors. He called it an issue he hoped to rectify into an “immensely doable” goal of topping €100 million (US$113.2 million).
The company is making a major shift into luxury, Bazin added, with 44% of its brands luxury and premium, and nearly half of the development in that sector in Asia Pacific. And after relaunching the Ibis and Sofitel brands, the Paris-based company is also planning relaunches over the next two years of Novotel, Mercure, Pullman, Raffles and Fairmont.
During IHIF the company made two brand announcements. The House of Originals luxury brand, in partnership with SBE, includes two London properties, one in Istanbul, a fourth in Miami Beach, Florida, and five other locations in its pipeline. Tribe, a middle market lifestyle brand with one property open in Perth, Australia, and 10 other openings scheduled through 2022 in Europe and Asia Pacific totaling more than 1,700 rooms.
Hyatt Hotels Corp.: Hyatt’s European arm signed 16 deals in the region in 2018, said Felicity Black-Roberts, vice president of acquisitions and development for Western Europe, with half of those franchised, making good on a goal to increase that type of agreement in the area. Locations include Dublin, Edinburgh, Frankfurt and Barcelona.
The company is also starting to look in second-tier European cities to amplify name recognition. Look for an announcement of a micro-lifestyle brand soon, Black-Roberts said, with the intention of folding in the Tommie brand from the company’s Two Roads acquisition, which it completed in December.
Another acquisition, 2017’s Exhale wellness brand, aims to be added to urban locations that offer the right demographic (probably not including the Park Hyatt and Grand Hyatt brands).
Rosewood Hotels & Resorts: With 25 properties open, the Hong Kong-based company had 12 new signings in 2018, including Venice, Hawaii’s Big Island, Vienna and Munich, and aims to get to 50 properties in five years, said President Radha Arora. The company’s “modern affluent customers want a local experience, he said, “not gold leaf and opulence.”
New properties may be affiliated with UNESCO heritage sites, he said. The long, and long-awaited, redo of the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris gave the company the confidence to seek out properties that it can transform in a modern way, such as a bank building in Munich.
Arora is observing trends: tri-generational travel where families book blocks of rooms, and an increase in interest in kids programming that’s more like a field trip and less like babysitting.
Africa and New Zealand are on his list of places he’d like to take the company next.