When is a hotel also an intermediary? When it's French giant AccorHotels.
The company's distribution experiment in Europe — which has been hotly discussed at conferences this year — is now coming to North America.
This winter AccorHotels, Europe's largest hotel group, will allow a first set of 200 independent hotels in North America to sell their rooms on AccorHotels.com in key cities across the U.S. and Canada.
The marketplace was opened 15 months ago. It now has 1,702 unaffiliated properties live. That means one out of every three hotels on AccorHotels.com is unaffiliated with the company. The group has signed 351 more, which are being added to the site this winter.
Hotels are chosen by their location, quality, size, and their rating on TripAdvisor — among other factors.
AccorHotels charges a commission fee that is about a third to half that charged by traditional online travel agencies. It is using in North America the same model it has used in Europe — 14% per booking if you are not a customer of FastBooking, its hotel digital services company, and 12% if you are.
Hoteliers have the option to enable guests to earn points in AccorHotels's loyalty program, with a 5% per booking fee for the property.
Senior vice president of eCommerce and digital services, Romain Roulleau, tells Tnooz:
"The thing we learnt is that once you connect 2,000 hotels, then you have to develop the sales, content, and visibility....We also have made a massive improvement in how we differentiate non-branded hotels with those affiliated with us on our display."
Jean-Luc Chretien, co-CEO at Fastbooking, says:
"What we underestimated was the loading and the management of the data from the hotels. We have had to make sure we have the accurate categorization of rooms and accurate pictures and details....
"We also had to inject more flexibility into AccorHotels's system and rules. We've made great strides and are nearly there...
"We've also learned we needed to hire marketplace managers to handle on-boarded properties and help the hoteliers give us the right rates and right information. We've made a lot of progress, so we can speed up our on-boarding globally.
"Lastly we want to increase the pace of consumer bookings."
The first North American markets are Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Montreal.
Pivotal moments 2015 – When AccorHotels launched its marketplace