Accor president and chief operating officer Yann Caillère reveals his priorities for the year ahead and tells Louise Oakley why the company’s brand diversification strategy stands it ahead of the competition
An interview with Accor president and COO Yann Caillère is a little like a geography lesson. Settled in one of the chill-out rooms on the meetings floor of Pullman Dubai Mall of the Emirates, I make the mistake of asking Caillère to reflect on the performance of each key region in which Accor operates in 2011.
Before I know it, he is working his way through the market details and trends of 90 countries — from Australia and Indonesia, Canada and the US, through to Morocco and Algeria, London and of course, Accor’s homeland, Paris.
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Generally speaking, Caillère says Accor has been “number one” in every key market except the US during 2011. Highest RevPAR increases have been witnessed in Asia-Pacific and some European markets, except southern Europe, where the company has struggled in “Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece”.
Challenges have been faced in parts of Africa, namely Ivory Coast, Egypt and Morocco, although conversely, hotels in Algeria have been “outperforming”.
Overall, Caillère is positive about what has been a strong year down to several company “specifics”. Firstly, the group’s impressive global spread is enabled by the fact it operates in different segmentations.
It has 13 core brands ranging from the luxury and upscale segments, namely Sofitel and Pullman, through to the Novotel and Mercure brands in the midscale arena, and the Ibis megabrand, now including Ibis Budget and Ibis Styles, at the economy end of the scale.
Secondly, Caillère is proud of the fact that Accor runs most of its 520,000 rooms worldwide through management contracts as opposed to franchise agreements.
“We are the number one hotel operator; this is important because when our competition are claiming they are the number one hotel operator, this is not exactly the truth, they do a lot of franchise,” Caillère claims.
“We do franchise but we don’t do much [when you take into account] the whole network. We have 520,000 rooms and among these we operate 400,000 rooms, meaning they are our own hotel or we operate under a management agreement.”
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