Skift Travel News Blog

Accor’s board said on Tuesday the company wants to simplify its organizational structure to create two business units. The move, which raises questions about possible divestitures, has been sent to employee representative bodies for their approval.

The two business units would be an “economy, midscale, and premium” division for 4,816 hotels representing brands such as ibis, Novotel, Mercure, Swissôtel, Mövenpick, and Pullman. It will have four regional headquarters based in Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Shanghai.

Another division would be for “luxury and lifestyle.” It would get four brand collections that together have 488 hotels: Raffles & Orient Express, Fairmont, Sofitel & MGallery, and Ennismore.

“By evolving from a generalist to a multi-specialist model, our aim is to further improve Accor’s appeal in the eyes of talents, owners, partners, and investors,” Sébastien Bazin, the group’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement that didn’t mention any cost savings.

Cue the inevitable questions about whether this planned restructuring makes it easier for Accor to spin off a part of its company to an acquiring investor.

“We would also expect this makes a break-up more likely longer-term, where different owners may be different in the varying merits of the two divisions,” wrote the research analysts at Bernstein in a flash note to clients.

Analysts at Bernstein also note: “It makes sense that the two divisions will have different long-term models (franchise vs managed), different target owners (“mom & pop” vs sovereign wealth funds), and different customers (international vs domestic).”

Pity the executives at Swissôtel, though. They must be asking themselves, “Why aren’t we luxurious enough?”

In a move that was no surprise, the board also endorsed the renewal of the contract of Bazin as the group’s chairman and CEO.

Amadeus said on Wednesday that it had launched a market forecast capability “to help hoteliers accurately track revenue and manage costs.” The tool is part of its business intelligence software suite, RevenueStrategy360, for hotels that it expanded after its acquisition of TravelClick several years ago.

“Most tools today look at historical data, but ours focuses on forward-looking data,” said Katie Moro, vice president of data partnerships. “We track on-the-books reservations data from companies that both use our services and those that don’t. We blend it with historical seasonality and trends.”

Moro spoke from Orlando at the trade show HITEC (Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference).

More than half of hotel bookings are being made within a week of travel, Moro said, citing data for bookings being made across all channels for about 35,000 hotels globally using Amadeus’s business intelligence software. So many revenue managers at hotels have shorter windows to make decisions on rates, promotions, and allocating inventory.

Amadeus’ forward-looking data shows global hotel bookings are on par with 2019 and surging.

“We’re tracking on a weekly basis hotel reservations coming in, less cancellations,” Moro said. “For the week ending June 17, we saw an increase of about half a million reservations over the week prior. We had also seen a huge spike ahead of Memorial Day, so it’s possible this increased demand is for the July holidays.”

Although a rising number of consumers have expressed a desire to travel more sustainably in recent years, one travel executive believes guilt is not an appropriate emotion when thinking fossil fuels emitted while traveling.

Michel Gelobter, a sustainability expert and CEO Cooler, said — during a discussed tilted “The Business Advantage of Sustainability” — at Skift Sustainable Tourism Summit on Wednesday that while reducing the use of fossil fuels would help improve travel, travelers shouldn’t bear the responsibility for making that happen.

“The people who really have to change are the ones emitting fossil fuels directly,” Gelobter said. “Radisson doesn’t have control over the smoke stacks (and) the power of their hotels.”

But Gelobter urged consumers to push suppliers, supply chains and policy makers to drive fossil fuels out of the market and run on clean energy.

“If you turn off your house in a good way, many forms of travel actually (have a) lower footprint than staying home, depending on where you live.”

Premier Inn’s owner Whitbread said on Wednesday that it has named Dominic Paul as its new CEO, to succeed Alison Brittain, who has “decided to retire from full-time executive life” at the end of the year.

Brittain had steered UK-based budget brand Premier Inn for a half-dozen years, including through the shoals of the pandemic, while also helping parent company Whitbread sell its popular Costa Coffee chain to Coca-Cola. Brittain has also been the rare woman worldwide in a CEO role of a hospitality company.

“It has been an enormous privilege to lead Whitbread during a period of significant expansion for our well-loved brands, in both the UK and in Germany,” said Alison Brittain in a statement. “The business has recovered from the pandemic well ahead of expectations and is continuing to trade strongly and gain market share.”

Mr Paul most recently served as CEO of Domino’s Pizza Group and was previously a managing director of Costa Coffee for three years, and was also a top exec at Royal Caribbean Cruise Line.

Sonder said it plans to expand in Dubai later this year with the opening of a 401-unit property, Business Bay.

Unlike some Sonder properties where customer service is solely via text messages, this 35-story building, operated by Sonder and developed by SAAS Properties, has a front desk in the lobby, a swimming pool, gym, and food and beverage facility.

Business Bay, a serviced apartment, would be Sonder’s third location in Dubai, the company said.

Sonder is marketing the property as being appropriate for both business and leisure travelers. It is located in the vicinity of the Dubai Mall and Burj Khalifa.

Cloudbeds, a San Diego-based software company that helps independent hotels set their set their rooms and market their inventory online, announced on Monday at HITEC 2022 that it’s acquiring hotel messaging software Whistle.

The move is part of Cloudbeds’ strategy to facilitate communication between accommodation providers and guests.

“The term contactless is becoming far too synonymous with hospitality,” said Richard Castle, Cloudbeds’ chief operator officer and co-founder. “We want more contact between lodging businesses and their guests to create purposeful touchpoints, answer questions and provide guidance through the entire guest journey.” 

Cloudbeds attracted $150 million worth of investment last year, led by Softbank. Meanwhile, Whistle’s clients include major international hospitality brands such as Choice Hotels, Accor and IHG Hotel & Resorts.

Craig Bonnar resigned this month as CEO of Travelodge. and yesterday the UK’s second-largest hotel chain after Premier Inn, appointed Jo Boydell, its one-time chief financial officer, to the top role.

Bonnar had been the top boss of the budget hotel chain since late 2020, steering the company through the turbulence of the pandemic.

Boydell has been with Travelodge since 2013 in a variety of finance roles.

Spain’s economy was among the worst hit in Europe during the pandemic, and now the government plans to make it easier for foreigners to obtain work visas so they can fill tourism-related jobs, including cleaning hotel rooms and waiting on tables in restaurants.

“We are evaluating different aspects of the migration law and where there is room to improve it … in order to address bottlenecks in Spain’s labor market,” Social Security and Migration Minister Jose Luis Escriva said Friday, Reuters reported.

The government doesn’t intend to merely target tourism with the work visa easing, but it was among the sectors the minister cited, along with tech, agriculture, and construction.

Among the plans is to permit some 50,000 students in the country from outside the European Union to combine their studies with working.

Spain projected earlier that its international arrivals would reach around 80 percent of pre-Covid numbers by June 2022.

Just look at their market caps — Booking Holdings $92.05 billion and Airbnb a humbling $77.8 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Booking’s share price has notched “single-digit gains” over the last six months, while “Airbnb’s shares have lost nearly a third of their value.”

Reporter Laura Forman attributes some of the discrepancy to the comeback and relative affordability of urban hotels versus soaring rates for short-term rentals.

Not to mention, we’d point out, seeming out-of-control cleaning fees with little rationale for the heft of the cost.

Airbnb’s average daily rates climbed 37 percent in the first quarter when measured against the first quarter of pre-pandemic 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. Citing STR data, the story said average rates for urban hotels around the world in April haven’t yet inched back to pre-Covid levels, while the average price of a room night for hotels as a whole has risen less than 15 percent in April compared to the same period three years ago.

Of course, as the story notes, Airbnb has the brand advantage over Booking.com as Airbnb spent less than a quarter of its revenue on sales and marketing in the first quarter of 2022 while Booking shelled out more than half its revenue on sales, marketing and related expenses.

Still, there’s a reason that Booking.com spends so much on performance marketing on Google even as Airbnb has reduced the percentage of revenue it spends on marketing on Google and elsewhere since 2020. The reason Booking.com spends so much? It seemingly is working.

The Wall Street Journal cited Sensor Tower data tallying Booking.com’s app installs in April as being 13 percent higher than in January 2020 while Airbnb’s app downloads fell 12 percent in the same timeframe.

“Ironically, Booking has managed to reinvigorate interest in its namesake brand this year by promoting its tired image,” the Wall Street Journal said. “A Super Bowl commercial for Booking.com featured The Wire star Idris Elba mocking the brand as having ‘never been accused of being sexy, flash or lit,’ unless, he adds, ‘we’re talking literal.'”

We’re unsure how much weight to give to Booking’s Super Bowl ad — which seemed to underwhelm — in its app download number uplift.

The signs of life in Booking’s stock price compared with six months ago has a lot to do with the comeback of cities, the reopening of Europe, where Amsterdam-based Booking.com has most of its strength, and the relative affordability of hotels.

After all, while some people wrote off cities during the pandemic as being permanently scarred, Booking’s Glenn Fogel argued — as did Peter Kern of Expedia Group and Steve Kaufer of Tripadvisor — that urban hotels and cities would be back. It appears as though that’s starting to take shape.

Europe-based fashion magazine Elle has announced plans to open a boutique 25-room hotel in Paris, reported the Business of Fashion on Tuesday.

Parent company Lagardère Group plans to open 15 Elle-branded hotels in the next decade. Maison Elle, set to open in October, will include a library on fashion design and the decor will feature will aim to look like the magazine’s photospreads.

A seaside Elle Hotel is in the works in western Mexico with owner-developer Actur, Le Figaro reported.

Elle’s move follows a growing momentum of fashion houses investing in brand extensions and licensing deals with hotels, reported the Business of Fashion.

Bulgari opened its first hotel in Milan in 2004 and now operates seven across Europe, the United Arab Emirates, China and Bali. Its hotels have seen occupancy surpass pre-pandemic levels and revenue double since 2019, said Silvio Ursini, executive vice president of Bulgari Hotels and Resorts. In the coming three years, Bulgari will nearly double its footprint, opening five more hotels in Moscow, Rome, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Miami Beach.

In March, Armani, which has two hotels in Milan and Dubai, announced it is set to open a third location in Saudi Arabia in 2025. Earlier this month, LVMH, which owns over 50 luxury hotels through its Hôtels Cheval Blanc and Belmond Hotel Group brands, appointed a new hospitality executive, signalling its own focus in the space.

The new Maison ELLE boutique hotel opens in Paris this fall. (ELLE Hospitality)