"A third of the world's population doesn't have access to drinking water, so we can't continue to create hotels as we did before." When asked about the future, Sébastien Bazin, chairman and chief executive of Accor, the world's sixth-largest hotel group, said reconciling his company's expansion with climate change and biodiversity challenges would be his "biggest project." He added that in May last year, environmental concerns had led him to drop plans to open a Raffles Hotel in Mykonos, Greece.
Does this mean he intends to moderate the French group's growth, particularly in countries that pay little attention to their carbon footprint? "Accor will continue to grow where needed while respecting the planet." Bazin, who has been at the helm of Accor since 2013, and whose mandate ends in 2026, implied only Europe might want to slow down. Driven by a growing middle class in emerging countries, demand for hotel rooms is set to increase by 5-7% over the next 40 years, while available supply is expected to follow at a rate of 1.5-2%. "We used to have a ratio of one to two in the shortage of rooms; we're going to go from one to three," Bazin said, as the number of travelers could soar from 1.5 billion to 2 billion over the next decade.
Accor has been keen to identify new growth in countries with solid demographic dynamics for some time. In what the group calls "Greater China," which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, it has opened around 640 hotels since 1984, while 390 are under development. "In no more than five years, China's domestic hotel industry will have surpassed that of the United States in size, having started 40 years later, in the 2000s," Bazin said, adding that success in China hinged on teaming up with a local partner.
Accor sold its stake in China's Huazhu from 2019 to 2023 – "the most profitable deal the group has ever carried out," according to Bazin – but Jin Jiang, the country's number-one hotel company, still holds a 12% stake in the French group.
Bazin said Chinese players appeared less keen today than in the 2010s to invest in the European hotel sector following "bad financial deals" and on the back of "a growing domestic market." He said this situation may only be temporary, especially as the world's leader – Marriott of the US holds the title at present – is likely to be Chinese before long. "A group like Jin Jiang is already fourth in the world, with around 14,000 hotels, and Huazhu is not far behind with 10,000 properties," Bazin said. According to MKG rankings, Jin Jiang already has more hotels than Marriott but fewer rooms.
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