AccorHotels ramps up its digital drive by transforming its AccorHotels.com distribution platform into a marketplace open to a selection of independent hotels.

Accor becomes AccorHotels and adopts a new signature:

A new name

With its new name, AccorHotels, the Group proudly upholds its hospitality business, it aims at increasing the clout and visibility of AccorHotels, which is both an institutional and a commercial brand, by connecting it to its digital platform AccorHotels.com. It also intends to place the brand at the center of its ecosystem of hotel brands.

In order for the Group brand and the hotel brands to cement their reciprocal bonds, AccorHotels will endorse all the brands’ communications and provide them with the credibility, assurance and expertise of an international leader. Likewise, the brand portfolio will always feature in AccorHotels’ communications to boost the appeal of both the Group and its digital platform.

A new signature: Feel Welcome

The Group also has a new simple, striking and universal signature that emphasizes on its desire to federate: Feel Welcome. Feel Welcome encapsulates the generosity and the very essence of hospitality. It is a promise addressed to all our audiences: customers, employees and partners, so that they feel expected, unique and privileged.

A new brand territory

To reflect the Group’s ambition, the new identity features a more statutory logo containing deep blue typography. This new logo continues to showcase the Group’s symbol, the single, emblematic honey-colored bernache goose. This migratory bird is the brand and mobile app icon. It symbolizes group spirit, determination and travel.

The new brand platform is also upheld by a Group’s manifesto which includes a semantic charter so that the brand’s personality can be reflected in every public address. The new visuals reflecting the spirit of service in the Group’s hotels and an original brand’s musical identity come to supplement this new brand platform.

This new identity is already visible on the Group’s space in the Village at Roland Garros, of which AccorHotels is an official partner. Sébastien Bazin, AccorHotels Chairman and CEO, declared

“Today, our Group changes and loudly and clearly proclaims its desire to go further, faster. Accor becomes AccorHotels and proudly re-assumes its role as a pioneer hotelier that never stops innovating and surprising, at the cutting edge of digital technology, but while remaining a hotelier, first and foremost. The Feel Welcome promise is a strong commitment to all our audiences and enriches the bond between the Group and its brands.”

AccorHotels ramps up its digital drive by transforming its AccorHotels.com distribution platform into a marketplace open to a selection of independent hotels.

This service will gradually become available to hoteliers in the first target markets starting at the end of June 2015, and guests will be able to access it from July 2015. In time, the objective is to offer more than 10,000 hotels in 300 key cities worldwide, or a three-fold increase in the number of hotels on AccorHotels.com.

This initiative is part of the Group’s transformation which kicked off in 2013. The independent hotels distributed on the AccorHotels.com platform alongside the Group’s brand hotels will be selected on the basis of hotel criteria with guest reviews taken into account. AccorHotels.com is already the leading online hotel booking platform in several markets, including France, Brazil, Australia and Germany. It will therefore provide independent hoteliers with a powerful alternative and qualitative distribution channel that meets their specific needs. This new offer guarantees them transparent display rules, access to their customer data and competitive commission rates.

This initiative will supplement the services developed by Fastbooking, a company taken over by the Group last April, within a new BtoB digital services activity. AccorHotels now offers a wider range of digital and technical solutions, to all its partners, as well as more support, guaranteeing them a better visibility as well as an increase in their direct web booking volumes.

Over the first two years of its roll-out, this initiative will represent an additional investment worth about 10% of the cost of the digital plan unveiled in October 2014. It will have an accretive effect from the third year.