PIONEERS OF TRAVEL •
Accor’s scale gives it considerable reach. Its UAE portfolio comprises 90 hotels and around 25,000 keys, with a further 18 hotels and 4,100 keys in the pipeline. In Saudi Arabia, it operates 48 hotels with approximately 22,000 keys, alongside a pipeline of 58 hotels and 17,300 keys. Across the Middle East, its network extends to around 380 hotels. For Healy, however, scale is most powerful when it is matched with the ability to read markets quickly and move investment accordingly. “Demand doesn’t disappear; it moves,” she says, and it is the line she keeps coming back to. When conditions change, the priority is to understand where travellers are going next and where confidence remains strongest. That requires looking well beyond booking data. Accor combines multiple signals, including search behaviour, active traveller intent, booking patterns, flight and route availability and loyalty engagement, to build a more complete picture of where demand is forming. During recent regional disruption, those signals helped identify resilient and transferable corridors. Investment could then be redirected towards opportunities including domestic travel in India and Australia, India into Thailand and Singapore, and Australia into Thailand. “What we were able to do was really look at where the demand was going,” Healy says. “We moved the money around and spent wisely.” The ability to do that has been strengthened by structural changes within Accor’s commercial operation. Around 18 months ago, the group moved towards a single-agency model across much of its e-commerce environment, consolidating data and marketing spend while giving teams a clearer view of performance. At the same time, Accor has developed a full-funnel, Audience-First approach and sharpened the positioning of individual brands. Healy describes the result as being “a little bit tighter across the whole gamut”, with clearer roles for each brand and a more connected view of the customer. Instead of starting with a campaign or media channel, Accor begins with the traveller: their needs, mindset, motivation and stage in the journey. That becomes increasingly important as discovery fragments across social media,
ALL Accor. Members stay twice as often, spend 10% more per night and are more than three times as likely to return, while more than 85% of member bookings are made directly. For Healy, the next opportunity is about building greater day-to-day relevance. ALL is evolving beyond the hotel stay, with partnerships across dining, mobility, financial services, entertainment and other lifestyle touchpoints giving members more reasons to engage with Accor between trips. “If you’re an ALL member, what are you doing on my app between your stays? What else can you get from the relationship?” she asks. That relationship is set to deepen further as ALL Accor+ Explorer expands across the Middle East and Egypt from October, bringing more than 100 hotels in 10 new countries, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, into its network of more than 1,500 participating hotels across 32 countries. That relationship also gives Accor a powerful indicator of trust. Consistent, personalised value can turn cautious spending into repeat business, while a larger member base in growth markets provides a direct, engaged audience when demand patterns become less predictable. The same thinking underpins Healy’s view of the high-performing commercial organisation of the future. Traditional boundaries between marketing, media, e-commerce, loyalty and customer intelligence will continue to blur. The strongest organisations will operate from a unified view of demand, combining real-time data, AI-enabled decision-making and customer insight to create future demand, capture active intent and convert that business into long-term value. “Data is at the heart of all of it,” Healy says. “What are you looking at? What’s your real-time insight? How do you move money in real time to keep winning the customer?” For a group with Accor’s geographic reach, portfolio depth and customer base, the opportunity is considerable. Its size gives it access to markets and audiences at scale; its systems provide a clearer view of where demand is emerging; technology allows teams to act faster; and loyalty creates a direct relationship with the customer. The advantage comes from making all of those elements work together. “It’s exciting,” Healy says. “There’s never a dull moment.”
creators, partnerships, traditional search and AI-powered recommendation environments. Each brand therefore needs a clear role within the portfolio and a strong reason to be chosen. The objective is to connect a traveller’s underlying motivation with the brand and experience best placed to meet it, while building awareness well before active booking intent begins. Technology is giving commercial teams increasingly sophisticated ways to understand those behaviours and convert them into growth. “For me, it’s probably the most significant change since the launch of OTAs,” Healy says of generative and agentic search. “Every time I have a conversation with our head of e-commerce, there seems to be a new layer, a new tool that’s doing something.” Accor is already using AI to improve demand identification and commercial performance. In Southeast Asia, it ranks in the top quartile of travel advertisers for AI adoption, while AI Max for Search has delivered a 28% revenue uplift and 14% increase in incremental bookings. For Healy, however, technology is only one part of the opportunity. AI may influence discovery, recommendation and decision- making, but hospitality brands still need to be distinctive enough to earn customer preference. “You need to build your brand,” she says. “A huge amount of what you’re trying to do is build your future customers, bring them into your ecosystem and make sure they’re aware of your brands. Do the brands stand for something?” That ecosystem increasingly centres on
Opposite: Loyalty messaging is prioritising emotion and experiences Above: Accor’s 100m+ ALL members give the group val- uable insight into customer passions, preferences and behaviour
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