Accor’s Legacy Brands Aren’t Left out of the Lifestyle Party, Says Bazin

The first SLS hotel in Dubai. More than half of the lifestyle hotels’ profit is not from rooms revenue but F&B, events and co-working, and not from tourists but locals. Legacies typically struggle with this.

Accor chairman and CEO Sebastien Bazin vows to build “enormous bridges” to transport insights and best practices from the lifestyle brands under Ennismore to the legacies. All photos by Accor

By Raini Hamdi, 20 December 2021

Accor is going at full throttle in growing its new lifestyle entity, Ennismore, but chairman and CEO Sebastien Bazin says legacy Accor brands such as Novotel, Mercure or Pullman won’t be left out of the party.

He vowed to build “enormous bridges” to transport insights and best practices from the lifestyle brands under Ennismore to the legacies. More than half of the lifestyle hotels’ profit is from F&B, events and co-working, not rooms, and from locals, not tourists. Legacy brands typically struggle with this, Bazin said in an interview in Singapore on November 17, 2021.

Pandemic travel restrictions have reinforced the value of local revenues to hotels, and fuelled customer demand for lifestyle experiences.

“We have legacy brands such as ibis, Pullman, Mercure, which I’m proud of. What we should be doing, and are starting to do, is to export lessons and best practices from the lifestyle brands to legacies. I’ve no doubt that a Novotel, Pullman, even ibis could have a lifestyle component, whether it’s design, culinary or personnel. And I’ve no doubt you can make an old hotel trendy; you just have to shift your mindset. I’m going to encourage enormous bridges between Ennismore and Accor so that all my owners are proud they are part of the adventure,” said Bazin.

Ennismore is a company within a company. Accor owns 66.67 percent of the joint venture and Ennismore founder Sharan Pasricha holds the rest. Ennismore remains based in London and operates autonomously from Paris-based Accor.

The new entity pulls together a who’s who list of 14 lifestyle hotel brands. This includes Ennismore’s Hoxton and Gleneagles, and brands such as Mama Shelter and 21c Museum Hotels, which Bazin snapped up one after another shortly after he was appointed chairman and CEO of Accor in 2013 (see Timeline below).

Currently Ennismore has 100 hotels, which is just two percent of Accor’s network of 5,200 hotels. This should grow to 250 hotels in three years. But Ennismore will “quickly” represent a “big” percentage of Accor’s profitability, said Bazin, who declined to say how big.

“Lifestyle is not easy to do. We opened SLS Dubai (in April). F&B can probably provide US$20 million in revenue, 90 percent of it from the local community. Hotel operators have never been able to do that. Usually, restaurants at hotels are empty,” said Bazin.

“It works because the professionals behind it have thought about who should be the chef, what is the design, what is the music — it’s a full team of people early on making the offer sexy for the local community.”

SLS Dubai, the first SLS in the Middle East, has 254 guestrooms, 371 residential units and 321 hotel apartments. F&B highlights include Fi’lia, an all female-run restaurant; Carna, a steakhouse by award-winning Italian butcher Dario Cecchini; and Privilege, a lounge and nightlife venue on the 75th floor which boasts the region’s highest two infinity pools and SLS’s iconic giant metallic duck sculpture.

How the Dots Connect

In Ennismore, Bazin has created a collection of lifestyle brands, different from a collection of independent hotels such as IHG’s Vignette, Hyatt’s Unbound, Marriott’s Autograph or Accor’s Emblems, launched recently.

Said Bazin, “A collection of boutique hotels, say, Marriott’s Autograph, is a soft brand. The revenue, the personnel, etc, depends on the nature of the hotel within the location. Mama Shelter (one of Ennismore’s brands) is a hard brand. It is scripted and you’d recognise one Mama Shelter to the other. More than 50 percent of the revenue has nothing to do with rooms. The metrics for Autograph is probably 20 percent.”

By grouping the lifestyle brands under one Ennismore umbrella, Accor accentuates to owners, and customers, it has the critical mass in the sector and is the go-to for their lifestyle needs.

The dots connected for Bazin, who envisioned that lifestyle was going to be important in 2013. There’s practically a lifestyle brand acquired or created each year since 2014 (see Timeline), beginning with Mama Shelter, then 25hours Hotels and 21c Museum Hotels. Its stake in sbe gave Accor five lifestyle brands in one swoop: SLS, Delano, Mondrian, Hyde and Morgans Originals.

Ennismore added three brands, The Hoxton, Gleneagles and Working From…, and Accor threw into the ring its own creations, So/ and Jo&Joe, and one other brand it bought in 2019, Tribe.

And that’s how the 14 brands in the new platform came about.

“We started early, before the pandemic, thank god,” Bazin said. “It wasn’t easy to assemble six companies, 14 brands, in 40 countries. It wasn’t easy to seduce Sharan Pasricha, Christoph Hoffman (founder, 25hours), Serge Trigano (founder, Mama Shelter) and the other founders to come along with us in a lifestyle portfolio and continue the adventure. It took some miracle.”

Will it be one merry family with no clash of egos? Moreover, Ennismore has not one but two CEOs, Pasricha and Gaurav Bhushan.

Bhushan was Accor’s global chief development officer before his move to London as Accor’s Lifestyle CEO in the chain’s corporate restructure last year. He initiated the talks between Accor and Ennismore’s Pasricha and sealed the deal, said Bazin.

“I’ve a story, the farmer and the hunter. The farmer babysits and nurture the brand, design, personnel, etc. That is Sharan. The hunter goes out to hunt (in this case for hotel owners). That is Gaurav. They complement each other.

“If they need a father to arbitrate, that’s me,” said Bazin.

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