Earlier in 2017, AccorHotels appointed Maud Bailly as the company’s chief digital officer, making her the head of digital, distribution, sales, and information systems, and a member of the executive committee.
A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and the École Nationale d’Administration, Bailly started her career in 2007 at the Inspection Générale des Finances (IGF). After several audit missions at the IGF, both in France and abroad, she joined the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF) as the Paris Montparnasse station’s director and deputy director of the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) product for the Paris Rive Gauche region, before becoming director of trains. After that, called by the Prime Minister’s Office in May 2015, she became head of the economic pole in Matignon (the Prime Minister’s official office), in charge of fiscal, tax, industrial, and numerical affairs. In this context, she tackled several issues of state reform, as well as post-Brexit issues for the Paris financial market.
In her current role, one of her major areas of focus is AccorHotels’ Leading Digital Hospitality programme, which was revealed in 2014 as a five-year, US $262m investment plan. It targets three stakeholders — customers, employees, and partners — and deals with IT infrastructure and data management.
Bailly tells Hotelier: “Sébastien Bazin (the CEO of AccorHotels) had the vision in 2014 that the hospitality sector was about to be highly disrupted.
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“We are facing two battlefields. The first is that of our traditional hospitality competitors. But the second is the internet and intermediaries — and I’m not talking only about OTAs (online travel agents), but all kinds of intermediaries that are going to sell services to our customers as well as the hotels.”
Bailly asserts that the programme has involved a “huge transformation” over the last few years, which has enabled the French operator to “anticipate this revolution instead of being the victim of it”.
With technology and the digital landscape changing so quickly, however, it’s Bailly’s task to update the plan — keeping it in line with the initial aims while adapting to the rapidly changing digital scene. Bailly adds: “Three years after [the plan’s launch], things have changed. The expectations and the habits of the customer are new. AccorHotels is no longer the AccorHotels of the past — we have been acquiring plenty of new brands.”
The group has added not only Fairmont Raffles Hotels International (FRHI) to its portfolio, but also services like John Paul and FastBooking, and in the last few months has revealed the acquisition of business travel hotel reservation service, Gekko; Australian hotel and resort marketer and operator, Mantra Group; and a 50% stake in the share capital of Orient Express, which was previously fully-owned by SNCF. All these businesses, Bailly says, enrich the operator’s overall service offering. It also makes her job more challenging, she admits — working on AccorHotels’ digital plan while accommodating all these changes.
Bailly has been travelling for six months, she says, to gain a better understanding of the needs and frustrations of the operational team members on the ground when it comes to digital developments. “Digital and technology are not that easy to understand and I see my role as very educational. I need to explain why we are doing things and why some tools are being implemented. Digital is never an end — it’s a means, it’s a lever.”
Without the understanding and buy-in of teams across the operator’s portfolio, she says, her plans will come to naught. “If you want people to appropriate your tools, they need to understand why.”
By the end of 2017, she hopes her final vision will be fully mapped out. This will involve a shift in not only the organisation and methodology within her department, but also in mentality.
Calling it a cultural transformation, Bailly says the operator’s move to an asset-light mode will affect various areas of the business — she is looking at revamping the loyalty programme and website, creating a chatbot, making data more reliable, and evolving the internal IT eco-system to better integrate all the new brands and businesses. “I’ve got one conviction: everything is going to be about personalisation,” she says.
“It’s no use trying to be an OTA; I won’t have as many hotels as Booking.com and Expedia, and it’s not my fight. I have to play with Booking.com and Expedia to maximise the occupancy rate and net profitability. I have to improve the performance of all my direct channels, and have to be sure that my real key lever is about personalisation. And personalisation is not just about loyalty programmes. [We need to] enrich it with all our new brands to improve the experience. If I can improve the experience, I can create [repeat guests].”
On that note, she reveals a programme called the AccorHotels Customer Digital Card (ACDC), which aims to ensure that the company shares data about customer preferences across its portfolio, enabling further personalisation of the guest experience. The initiative is currently being tested worldwide.
“It creates ‘sparkle stories’. It creates [loyalty] because guests feel they are recognised. And it also creates satisfaction for the employees,” she says. The programme will be rolled out globally in 2018, she adds.
Bailly concludes: “We are not going digital for digital’s sake. It’s [about] something concrete — customers’ experience in the hotel or business performance for hotel staff. Digital is a fantastic lever for global performance, but it’s only a lever. If you want to be good, you have to make sure that people understand and appropriate it.”
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