My role as CEO of Accor is probably ten times easier than that of a small business owner, and I often say that.
It's a market blessed by the gods. That's roughly two million people who come to an Accor hotel every night. That's 6,000 hotels, 12,000 restaurants, and 350,000 employees.
I read somewhere that before taking the reins at Accor, you were a bit of a jerk.
It's true. I have doubts, but I have a self-confidence that is almost unshakeable. So that scares everyone. As long as I don't become arrogant, everything's fine.
You have a former president on the board of directors. What's the point of having Nicolas Sarkozy on the board of a group like Accor?
We have an enormous difficulty reinventing ourselves, which is why we made those acquisitions. I feel like I'm building an enormous tower that today has 22 floors. Each floor is a brand of the group. I don't know how many floors this tower will have. I just want to finish the work.
What's interesting is that when you come back from the States, your culture changes. I've never prepared a single speech in my life. I don't even have a computer. It's true. No need to prepare. Just speak from your gut, be spontaneous, and it works.
Well, here we are for this first episode with a CAC 40 CEO on Génération du Self. Hi Sébastien.
Strange to start with me, huh?
Well, listen, there's a very precise choice. I won't betray a secret — you told me earlier in the kitchen, 'Watch out, a CAC 40 CEO can quickly get boring and that's not very nice.' Well, I'm telling you that right away. Not everyone has that. But we said that with Sébastien Bazin, given your profile, your career path over the years, and also the recent decisions at Accor to publish all your figures, your ambitions, and to follow all that almost daily — I think you're one of those people who speaks their mind freely. And that's what interests me for this podcast. That was one of the reservations I could have with non-founders for Génération du Self, because the idea was really that founders are more likely to tell their story and that of the company. They're more connected to it than sometimes some CEOs who are a bit muzzled by scripted messaging, things you can say or not say, fear of the stock market, and so on. So the good news is that after me, or maybe a third episode, you'll probably stop. Exactly — it'll be a little series. We'll open this big series. I don't know if we'll get to 40, we'll see. And besides, there are some variations. You came back to the CAC 40 not so long ago, actually.
But before we start all this episode and talk about strategy, assets, I'd also like to make this episode, for me, a little masterclass in management coming from big groups and from the hotel industry, because it's an environment that fascinates a lot of people. I have quite a few friends in that world too. We're going to talk strategy — I have a billion questions. But I propose, if you're okay, that we start with something that's really going to bore everyone. If there are boring topics, this one's it.
Yeah, but I think I have some really deep questions about it. But before all that, if you don't mind, I'd like to introduce myself.
Sébastien Bazin. I'm 63 years old. I'm a Scorpio, rising Scorpio, and I've been happy for 63 years. I'm at the head of Accor completely by chance. Before that, I lived in the United States, I lived in England, I changed careers at least eight times, and each time it was a good idea to change careers and change work environments. I never had a career path. I never had a common thread. I never wanted one. Everything that happened to me came from a meeting with someone — a man or a woman — who seduced me, and I went to join that person in an adventure. So now I've calmed down because I've been at Accor for 12 years. I haven't left yet and I don't want to leave. But my life imposes itself on me. So, I'm here a bit by chance. Also, this morning I didn't really want to do this, but I'm doing it anyway. We'll see where you take me over the next two hours.
The key word: I have doubts, but I have a self-confidence that is almost unshakeable. So that scares everyone. As long as I don't become arrogant, everything's fine. The boundary between self-confidence and arrogance — it's complicated for others, it's complicated for those who listen to me. That doesn't mean I have certainties. I don't have certainties about everything, but I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of much. I have very little stress. I sleep very well. I love stories. I love ambition. I love taking people along. I love building. So if I had to summarize in one word the most beautiful job in the world — one I'll never do, and it's a regret — I'd say architect. I think it's the holy grail: that moment when an architect looks at a landscape or a site with their eyes, dreams, and begins to understand what they're going to draw. Then their brain gets going, and their fingers start drawing. And then they go convince someone to realize their dream. And once it's done, they look back and they've left a trace. So architecture is a wonderful profession.
I must say I agree quite a bit. One of my hidden dreams — though I talk a lot in my podcast, I've never revealed this here — would really be to build a house or something like that. With an architect. But have you already done that, you? Or I imagine with hotels perhaps?
Not directly, but it's probably — consciously or unconsciously — there's no doubt that in my head for 12 years, that architect side in me, I feel like I'm building an enormous tower that today has 22 floors. Each floor is a brand of the group. I don't know how many floors this tower will have. I don't know the shape of the roof. What I know is that all the floors don't look alike, and I love the idea of an edifice. It's not a cathedral either, but that builder side is probably what made Accor successful. The Pelisson family were builders when they created Accor in 1967. So I'm doing it on my small scale. I'm taking over.
You say you did eight careers, changed eight times. Between the lines, I read that maybe there was one time where you perhaps even better changed careers because there was one that might have been harder or more annoying than the others. Which one was that?
A big football club? No, wait — it wasn't even one of my eight careers. I was chairman of PSG, but that doesn't count. I was an intern — it wasn't counted.
No, because first, it wasn't a career. It was an investment, it was a passion, it was a moment in life. That one — it's deeply anchored in me because it was violent, because it was immediate, because there was a strong demand from fans, and I was accountable. And probably I hadn't thought enough before investing in Paris Saint-Germain. I found myself with something bigger than me. I had to be careful. We had to deliver. The players had to show up. The budget had to be secured. The communication had to be good. I've said it before — it was five and a half years of my life. It was 3% of the investments I was responsible for and 80% of my headaches. PSG never stops. When you're involved with PSG, it's morning, noon, evening, weekends. There's a newspaper that writes half of its content as errors, or at least nonsense — but on purpose, to provoke PSG's decision-makers into responding to what's inaccurate. It built a shell around me. I took a lot of hits. It was difficult. But with hindsight, I'd never do it again. But did I enjoy it? Yes, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the players. I enjoyed being in contact with the fans because they had things to tell me, because they had PSG tattoos, because I respected them, I admired them. It wasn't planned. I confronted a reality I didn't know. What I did best was pass the baton to Qatar.
Laurent, can you hear me?
Wait, wait — Laurent, you just got my message, but I'm already recording with Sébastien. Can you hear me?
Well, I'll kiss him then. That's Laurent Gourcuf. He kisses you too. Do you have a question for Sébastien or not? Live.
Hey, everyone can hear you.
Yeah, something you've never asked him. A question you'd really like to ask him.
When is he going to stay with us? Because that's the most important thing.
Okay, that's all that interests you. I'll kiss you, talk later.
Personal questions, but they're personal, so I'll ask them one-on-one.
Okay, bye. Sorry, I had to take that call. How long will you keep running Accor?
As long as the board of directors decides. It's not my company. I'm just in charge of it. The board decided fifteen days ago to extend my mandate until May 2028. After the general assembly will ratify it in May, but those two extra years were essential — not necessarily necessary, I hope important for me. I just want to finish the work. So we set out a plan through 2023. I think it's good for me and for the group that I finish the plan we drew up together. Also, before arriving at Accor, I wanted to finish the PSG chapter.
You said you enjoyed it. Are you still an avid supporter?
Yes, I'm still an avid supporter. I went to the match on Sunday evening. I was at the Liverpool match. Accor is still a sponsor of the club. Yes, it's complicated to detach from a club, from a passion, from a history. Once — I'm not a fanatic, I don't have a PSG tattoo — but it's a life journey. It's a moment. And I like how everything has evolved, even though it's extremely difficult. You can see it took 14 years to have the team we have today. I love the unexpected, and football is full of the unexpected. After, you can blame the referee, the players, the owners. But that's why I love English football. Something always happens in the last five minutes, and you're never certain of the result. There's adrenaline, there's — I don't know — there's the force of football. So I agree. Sometimes people ask me if AI will replace podcasters, because there are more and more things — you know, there's something called Notebook LM made by Google, where you have two AIs talking. And you say, it's a bit like FIFA the video game replacing PSG-Liverpool — two consoles playing against each other. It has no interest. But I was at Parc des Princes on Sunday and I ran into Pauletta, Ludo, Claude Makélélé — and yet we lived moments together. We were almost relegated to Ligue 2. I'm not terribly proud of everything we did, even though I tried to be as clear-headed and disciplined as possible. It's nice to run into players 12, 15 years later who remember what we went through together, because it's indelible.
What's nice in football or sports — and maybe not so much in companies — is that there are victories and defeats, but it's rhythmic with something. Do you miss that?
No, I don't miss it because I feel I experienced it during COVID. During COVID we had a certain number of emotions that were almost similar to football — there was unpredictability, we had doubts, we didn't really know where we were going. And that brought the team together tremendously. During that period I recognized a kind of osmosis, structure, trust, and listening that was incredibly important.
I understand. I experienced it through a company I managed at that time. To finish on football — you said earlier you wouldn't do it again but you don't regret it. If there were big learnings or big takeaways — what did it bring you? What did it change? If I can take a few of those?
Yes, it brought one thing that is very powerful: getting out of what others think of you. During my five and a half years at PSG, I was heavily criticized — perhaps rightfully so — saying we hadn't invested enough, that we didn't have enough ambition, that we didn't have the right talent. All that is probably partly accurate. But I didn't do it because there was no economic model in football, and I didn't want to lose all my shareholders' money. So it was by design. I held back, I was frugal, so as not to... When you have people every day writing the most vicious things about you — to be able to extract yourself from that feels incredibly freeing. That's what I call a shell. And so maybe before, but since then, I have a trait that is quite astonishing: I don't need to live in someone else's eyes. The perception others have of me matters very little to me. That's why I'm here with you this morning. I say it again: it's strange. I can do interviews. I never watch or listen to them. I can. I've extracted myself from myself. It's incredibly healthy, it's incredibly simple.
It happens to a lot of people quite young. You see it with influencers who suffer tremendously in the world of influence. There's a very interesting book called The Courage to Be Disliked, which is really foundational for many, because it's both healing for many and part of your profession, because even as CEO of a CAC 40 company, to a lesser extent I imagine, you still have shareholders and financial press who tear you apart along the way, no?
No, but that doesn't mean we don't want to be liked. When people tell you 'You're great, we love you, you're important' — it feels good. We need that. I'm just saying that the violence of words — you just need to breathe deeply and say it's actually not very serious, as long as you have that confidence and people who love you nearby.
It's true, it's a bit linked — what you're saying is related to Stoicism. Based on the idea that if you inflate your ego when you're loved, you'll suffer most when you're hated and criticized. But if I come to Accor — I think I read somewhere — is it true that you arrived not by chance, but you were at Colony, you had a strong stake, you'd already worked more or less in the hotel world — at Fairmont and Raffles, right? And we were at the Raffles in Monaco last week, it's always very cool, by the way, bravo. And I read somewhere that before taking the reins at Accor, you were a bit of a jerk — said by Sébastien Bazin himself, not Mathieu or Stéphanie.
It's true, it's partly true. It's not so much about stupidity — it's a question of lack of clarity. When I'd spent — I bathed in the world of finance for 25 years. I loved it too. I started as a broker, financial analyst, then stockbroker on Wall Street, then investment banker, then investor. Some wonderful years on Wall Street. And I hadn't measured at all the dichotomy between criticizing someone on their trajectory, on what they should do — when you're a shareholder, you tend to give a lot of advice, have a lot of opinions, and ask managers to go faster, be more competent, get better results — I had never measured the difficulty of being a manager, this measure of time which is very different. When you're a shareholder, you don't realize that between the action, the thought, and the execution of a leader, it takes two or three years to get teams on board. So for years, without knowing it, I was too abrasive, too intrusive, too critical. And in many cases, I should have kept quiet.
The gap between action, thought, and execution being three years — we'll come back to that. What is Accor?
Accor is a world champion in hospitality and restaurants. It's a beautiful profession — welcoming people and taking care of them. It's quite something to wake up in the morning and say, 'Today I'm going to welcome even more people and take care of them.' That's roughly two million people who come to an Accor hotel every night. It's a network that was originally European when I arrived twelve years ago, which is now very global. In two words: 6,000 hotels, 12,000 restaurants, 350,000 people, and it's the world number one. If I had to pick two important countries, the United States and China. But outside the US and China, whether it's Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, Japan, or the Middle East, Accor is number one. So it's a tremendous French actor that succeeded in spreading through many countries with different cultures, different religions, different skin colors — and each time it worked. There's a great nobility in Accor's 55-year journey. I'd call it a human nobility — the ability to give someone a chance.
Would you know how to welcome guests yourself?
The answer is yes. Because people don't know this, but when I was at the Sorbonne doing a small master's in management and economics, I decided from the start never to go to class during the day. I was working during the day as a financial analyst — not to pay for my studies, because my parents could afford it, and the Sorbonne cost nothing — but I was a night watchman three days a week at a hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés called the Lenox. So I started long before my career path to know how to welcome people, from 7 PM to 11 PM, including making club sandwiches at 1 AM and leaving at 6 AM. During those three years as a night watchman — I don't even know why I imposed it on myself, but I wanted that adventure. So my vocation probably started when I was about 19.
It's a topic — you probably know OctoLib, Nicolas Chabanne — I don't know if you've met him, but I recorded with him a while back. He told me he'd become the CPO — Chief Product Officer — of his company, meeting two clients twice a week, in a company that's ultimately much smaller than Accor, though growing fast. You could sense between the lines that many CEOs actually disconnect from their business, from their customers. How do you avoid that disconnection?
Well, I never have. First, because for a large part of my career, we invested in hospitality. At Colony, 80% of investments — except PSG — were in hotels. And also, before arriving at Accor, it turns out that in my family we bought three hotels. There's one in Cap Ferret that I no longer have, but we kept it for seven years. There's one in Saint-Briac — the most beautiful place in the world, in Brittany — and the third is in Mers-les-Bains. My son manages all that. So I have the intimate conviction that I know fairly well the headaches, the difficulties of running a small hotel with 30 rooms, 17 rooms, 45 rooms. Which means the first discussions I had with Accor franchisees or employees — I had some knowledge under my belt. I knew the difficulties. I knew it's not easy. In a hotel, there are two or three unforeseen events per day — people don't realize it, but a guest may have lost his passport and you have to help find it, a child is sick and you have to call a doctor, a third one — the boiler breaks down in winter and you have to try to fix the hot water tanks. So you need agility. And I knew those daily storms personally. And like any boss, when you scale up the business, the headaches are more complicated than when you do it yourself.
It's more complicated than when you do it yourself?
No, I have an intimate conviction that has been there for a very long time. My role as CEO of Accor is probably ten times easier than that of a business owner. In my head, I don't know why I think of this, but someone who runs a fleet of about twelve trucks in regional France — that person has enormous pressure on their shoulders. They know all twelve drivers, their children are probably in the same school. One day a year they probably won't be able to pay them on time, they have problems with the administration, they can't really confide because it's a small village — but they have to deliver. The stress for someone running a small or medium-sized business is, in my opinion, ten times greater than mine. And I say that with a lot of humility, honesty, and sincerity. I have the good fortune of a huge group with lots of cash, lots of technology, lots of talent, lots of strength. So I experience things that are extremely different from what a French business owner experiences.
I'm going to give a quite different perspective. In my entrepreneurial life, I grew to about 100 people in my company. At that point I found I was starting to have less control. I liked that stage you describe where I knew everyone, all the first names, I did all the hiring, and so on. Then it started to fall away — I wasn't really managing people anymore, I didn't necessarily know what each one was individually worth, and it wasn't a phase I loved. I thought, it's too much. And what impresses me about your profession, your job — and what I can't quite fully understand, though I had the same issue with the Indux CEO — is how you manage to create a framework, an organization of excellence that pushes toward an objective. I'll give you a very concrete example. I have a few — when I think about it, many important moments in my life at Accor — I created a company in Tunisia, and everything started at the Hotel de Tunis. I arrived there, met a guy who said, 'You'll see, go to Nina, she's the accountant, she'll help you set up the company.' At the Hotel de Tunis there was Rania at reception who was great, always recognized us, wonderful welcome, always upgraded us — it was great. And alongside that there was this guy — anecdotes that make me howl with laughter about the quality of people's work, but they need training. This guy who, when you're at breakfast and you put salt and pepper on your food and there's no more pepper in the shaker, you say, 'Excuse me, would you have another pepper shaker?' He takes the pepper shaker, puts it on the neighboring table, takes that table's pepper shaker, and puts it there. You say, 'But this is going to go on forever.' You see, if you don't explain to him how to do it — that person, or rather, you see, in such an organization — it's the level of detail. How do you instill this?
That's a profession. I'll talk about it right now because it's probably what I'm most proud of. It has nothing to do with me — it was created before me and we've just sustained it and perhaps amplified it. What people don't realize is that Accor has a real growth ambition across many territories. We talked about it — it needs this size to be able to compete with new digital players. We'll talk about it again perhaps — online agencies, Booking, Airbnb, and so on. But Accor hires 120,000 new people every year. I absolutely need the answer to this question because I've been asking myself it for five or six years. I think we're probably one of only about five groups in the world that hire more than 100,000 new people per year. And what's very astonishing about these 120,000 people we hire each year is that 70% of them have never had secondary education and have never worked before. Between 18 and 25 years old. And we take them on, we teach them a trade — whether it's plumber, electrician, bellboy, maître d'hôtel, chef de rang, receptionist — about fifty trades at Accor. And we do it with passion, desire, I hope generosity, sincerity. And we give them, I hope, a chance in life — at least a better self-esteem, because they'll have been given responsibilities, they'll have had a salary, it will have helped the local community. They leave after three or four years precisely because they have more confidence in themselves. And we start again and we start again. So it's not about the pepper shaker — it's one of the rare professions in the world where even if you haven't had the privilege, even if you were in a less easy place, there are industrial actors — and we're one of them — who will accompany you for a part of your life. Some stay thirty years. But I'm totally amazed and filled with admiration, and filled — that's the word — by this capacity. So we train 100,000 people, and everywhere I go in the world — I travel 300 days a year, meaning I'm not often home — I go to all the countries. It's a rhythm that is divided between governments, because we're often the first employer — a third with my investor partners who invest in hotels, and a third with employees. And I love it.
And the only thing — now, speaking of restaurants, everyone at Accor knows — they make sure I always face away from the dining room, because I see everything.
It's probably linked to the three hotels I have, and so when I see someone put the pepper on the neighboring table, it annoys me. They make sure — out of respect for the local manager, it's not for me to make comments — but I like to see everything.
So if you see it, you don't say anything?
I never make comments — certainly not to the employee. I don't make comments to the restaurant manager. I wait until I'm alone with the hotel director to say, 'I noticed this and that. Could you do something about it?' But there has to be a hierarchy — it's not for me, the big boss, to start making comments to an employee. That's not right, and it's not interesting.
We're going to talk about this strategy — asset light and asset heavy — because it raised a lot of questions for me at the beginning and still does. The analogy I can make is Jean-Charles Naouri with Casino. He sold off all his properties — or many of them. And my perception, as an entrepreneur, is that we bought our offices here and then I sold the company but kept the offices. I did more or less the opposite path. For many reasons, when I heard Naouri doing that, I thought it was strange because as an entrepreneur, I buy the walls to give myself a second safety net — to say, I always have that if needed. And he sold the walls to develop differently. And from what I understood, many of those property owners raised the rents, so they ended up with such thin margins — it's one of the differences in retail as well — that they were strangled. And many of those shop owners blamed him, saying it was nonsense. When I first saw Accor doing that, I thought: they're selling the family jewels. And I have the feeling it's quite different. And I'm the first to tell you — it was a strategy that was quite criticized but seems to be bearing fruit. Can you explain a bit the difference and perhaps why?
No, there aren't bad or good strategies on this. I'll explain, because there's a reason why I did it. Accor was born as a group whose DNA was builder, owner, developer, and manager of real estate. That's how it started quite naturally, because there was no hotel infrastructure at the time. There was no investor ready to take a risk in a profession that didn't yet exist in the mid-60s. Then they became so big that they didn't realize that when you start having two, three, four thousand hotels, you begin spending hundreds of millions on plumbing, on redoing roofs, on facade renovations. And these hundreds of millions that were invested in real estate were not invested in the customer relationship, in technology, in everything that makes the trade of a hotel operator. And what's more, it was done by the same people without any discernment — were they investing to maintain the property's value, or for a better customer experience? Those were two completely different businesses within the same house. So the first thing I did was say, 'Wait — there are people who will be specialized in real estate, specialized in plumbing, specialized in return on investment. And there are others who will specialize in the P&L, in margin, and in the customer experience.' They're really two completely different brains. Personally, a lot of people invested in hospitality say of course you should own the walls first, because it's a patrimony protection, because you can put debt on it, you create value. Accor had to choose — we couldn't keep doing both.
Today the 6,000 hotels are worth 180 billion euros — just the Accor hotel portfolio. Imagine if I have to put four percent of that amount just in maintenance — meaning trying to keep the exploitation going — it's 80 billion, that's the real estate value, the value of Accor hotel real estate worldwide. So I said, when you're a publicly listed company, you need to make your stock market story extremely understandable, readable, and simple. And you need to make it repetitive enough so people understand and grasp the risk. So at that point I said, if we divest all the real estate, that money can be reinvested in the customer relationship, in brand promises, in technology — and let others do this real estate business, which will be done better, with a better philosophy and better priorities. That's what I did for Accor — it was to simplify life. Those who bought the real estate did well. And many of my franchisees own their real estate — they should absolutely not part with it. If Accor hadn't been publicly listed, maybe we could have kept both. Since we were listed, we had to simplify life. I always said when I arrived that Accor was what I called a Niçoise salad — it was incredibly complex. We had fixed rents, variable rents, minimum guarantees, owned properties — it was a mess. But it was forty years of natural, legitimate history. So I unstitched a good part of Accor's history to settle on a job I love: serving people. The human contact, the interaction.
And it was misunderstood for four or five years because you get the impression of renouncing what was your history.
With hindsight, I think everyone would say we did well to do it. And even more so during COVID, because if we had kept all the lease commitments while having no revenue, Accor would probably have been in commercial court and in judicial protection. So it was a stroke of luck. Could I have predicted a pandemic? Of course not. But having divested the real estate before the pandemic gave Accor the means to resist and find its breath, and that of the group today.
To understand this strategy a bit more in detail — so we're going from heavy assets to light assets. On the asset-light side, we're talking about holding buildings, properties. So that was our property — either we owned it or we leased it. And you said, we're going to stop owning anything, we're going to stop leasing anything. We're going to let other investors — whether it's sovereign wealth funds — invest in Accor hotels, and I'm only going to manage them on their behalf. So you take no more real estate or investment risk. If I take a concrete example — we went to New York, we did a great trip to the States, we did the Sofitel in New York and Los Angeles, it was great. And New York, I think it's being — it's under renovation, it's going to be redone. It took you five years — that's the whole problem of the asset-light strategy. Once you give up the walls, you become dependent on a third party who has to decide if they want to invest.
Is that the dependency that's interesting?
That's exactly the question. The building was yours before — this building, it was ours to begin with.
Yes. You sold it to someone. I think over there it's a Singaporean-Chinese from Hong Kong who lives in Singapore.
He buys it from you. You have a contract — for 100 years or...?
No, no. These contracts are about 20 years, between 20 and 25 years. And in 20 or 25 years, the risk is they double the price. The first risk is they leave — so they put up another brand. They could go to Marriott, they could go to Hilton. But the risk comes before that: a hotel needs to be redone roughly every eight to ten years.
Ah, I had that question for earlier.
So during the total renewal period, we redo all the bathrooms and so on. Every eight years we redo — paint, we redo the carpets, we redo of course all the fixtures every year. But if a hotel isn't redone after ten years, it shows. And the brand image — that's when we have what we call brand standards, in which the person who buys the hotel and signs the Accor contract has obligations on brand standards. And if they don't respect their investment obligations, we can withdraw the brand. But that puts us in a somewhat complicated situation, because we like the owner — maybe they don't have the means at that time. But today, when I say I spend a third of my travel time meeting hotel owners, that's precisely why. It's to tell them: your hotel is deteriorating, I'm in charge of it, it's not exactly the image you want to present, you don't have the profitability you want. You need to put a little money back into the bathrooms.
So you're literally going to visit the hotel and say, 'Look at this, this isn't acceptable'?
Pretty much. No — it's that I know, I think, 4,000 of the 6,000 hotels. And since I have a very good visual memory, I know exactly. The good news is that every time they invest, we manage to increase the room rate, so they recover profitability. So it's not investment for nothing. But you do have to remind them practically every year. Eight, ten years — that's interesting.
How do you make sure they do it? In New York, you said it took five years. Given the quality of hotels in New York and the prices, at some point, 80% of them do it, 10% don't have the means, and 10%... When you open a hotel in a provincial French city, the economic activity can move from the east of the city to the west. So you end up with a hotel built in the 1980s that's no longer in the right location in the city, even though it was 40 years ago. At that point, it's probably better not to make the investments and let that real estate have another destiny, because there's no point putting money into a place that's no longer where people want to go.
It's funny because Accor is so big that as soon as you talk about something like that, you have an image right away. For me it's the Mercure in Cherbourg, which was demolished — it was on the port, I don't know if you saw the old one — and was rebuilt in the center, because it was no longer in the right spot. It's closer to the train station and so on.
That's why I say that in many cases, the local fabric — we know it quite well. Accor knows the landscape like the corner café. And that's why during the COVID crisis we fought — I was asked to do it, I was very hesitant — in this role of conductor between business organizations, between the small restaurateur, between the big hotel chains. But I did it for one reason: people don't understand that we won't be able to keep growing in France unless the small-town fabric is strong. In every small French village where there's an Ibis, there's always its local commerce, its café, its social fabric, its appeal. And so people will go to a small town in the south of France because that town lives, because it has culture. And I need the local fabric to be as robust as possible. So we fought alongside the small café owner, because I probably need him more than he needs me.
Can Accor still grow in France?
We're close to 2,000 hotels in France. We probably won't get to 4,000. But in France today, 70% of hoteliers are independent — they don't have a major hotel group brand. In the United States, it's 10% — 90% of hotels in the US have a major hotel group brand. That means the French market isn't yet consolidated. There are plenty of small hotels with 12 rooms, 17 rooms, wonderful ones, where unfortunately I can't put a brand.
There's something else that worries me, linked to my first question — and it's true for many listed companies — that a CEO often thinks, 'After me, the flood.' What interests me is the stock listing now, and then when I'm gone they'll manage. Looking at this — in New York, for example, in 20 years, in 25 years, I don't know when you sold it to that owner — it was 15 years ago. In 10 years he'll say, 'I'm going to hand it to...'
No, we fight to keep them. Now, we were opening close to one hotel a day four or five years ago — 365 new hotels per year. Now we've reduced by design to about 300. Whatever — but we're losing about a hundred. So I'm still positive by about 200 hotels per year. It's quite natural too. And among the hotels we lose, at least three-quarters are ones I want to lose. It's that it's no longer the right brand in that environment, and the investor wants to switch to something else. It's not a for-life, 50-year thing. The most important thing for me is to attract new ones, keep the old ones of course, but to make sure the brands show up, are beautiful, and the product is the best possible.
There's something else I find — you did well on this in recent years — which is the premiumization. At some point, Ibis — maybe because I'm getting older and I've become a bit bourgeois — even Novotel, and even Sofitel, had at some point a somewhat aging branding. That's less and less the case, I find, at Sofitel. But it's true that you think, 'Well, it's in an Ibis,' and they're perfect, our Ibises. Honestly, we're sometimes a bit surprised by the Ibis hotels. There's no brand I... It's funny because I've been asked the question several times — do I have a preferred brand? And each time I try to answer. We have 47 brands today. When I arrived, there were 14. I don't have a preferred child. But I had an ambition that was very clear when I arrived: when I came to Accor, it was 85% European and 90% what we call economy and mid-range — so Ibis, Novotel, Mercure. And I very much wanted to conquer international markets, because that's where growth is highest. And I very much wanted to move up the scale by going toward more premium brands that would meet a more affluent clientele. That's why we went from 14 brands to 47. Europe went from 90% to 45%. France from 50% to 20%. And the group is almost one-third in luxury brands, whereas it was very little before — almost nothing. And that was done deliberately to rebalance the group, to give it better foundations. We're coming back to architecture — better foundations, better standing, better reputation, a better customer journey. Because the person listening to us will probably go to three or four different group brands. They'll go to an Ibis because they need it for business, then they'll be found in a Mercure where the gastronomy is different, then with their family in a new hotel because there's a pool, and occasionally they'll go to a Sofitel somewhere in the world because they have access to a beach, and so on. It's the same customer. And if we can keep them in the Accor brand universe across different experiences, all the better. That ensured, I think, greater visibility for the group and more desire for people to join. We were too Franco-French, too European — not that it was badly done, it was remarkably done, but it was time to accelerate.
What's well done — and I'm not being harsh on Ibis, but in this case, I find it's just an image from another time. And probably today's Ibises are not the same as ten years ago. They've changed — there must be close to 200,000 new beds in the Ibises. You sleep incredibly well in an Ibis. But it was always — for me it was a bit the plastic bathroom, a bit old-fashioned, less stylish than a Holiday Inn.
Ah, that's for sure. But that's okay — it means there's something for every taste.
Yes, of course. No, but between that and the Mama Shelters and so on, I find there's been a real brand renewal.
When I hear you also, I could think — I think of other brands like Decathlon. You could say, it's going in every direction, maybe there are too many brands. Are those questions you ask yourself?
No, I was criticized — when we went from 14 to 25, they said it was nonsense. Then we went to 30, then 38, then 47. And it's not nonsense at all. First, it's not a race to have an additive number of brands. It's just that — you're well placed to know — digital channels today are so efficient that through a single booking channel, showing 47 brands, 30 brands, 50 brands costs me no more. The only thing is to have real discernment about which brands have a vocation to be global. Ibis, Novotel, Mercure, Sofitel — you find those in about 80% of countries.
And then there are other brands called Pullman, Mantra, MGallery that you've never heard of, they don't have any... they're very important brands in New Zealand, very important in Australia, very important in South Africa. These brands don't intend to leave the territories where they're significant. So that's the discernment between what's regionally important and what's important globally. You don't necessarily benefit from transforming them to have a global vision like Coca-Cola. I don't know, no... So anyway, but it was fun to go out of... we actually came out with something very conscious that people don't realize, for at least 40 years, meaning between 1960 and 2000, all hotel brands looked alike. A Hilton looked like a Hilton, an InterContinental, a Novotel... it became quite annoying because even the lamp, the color of the lamp, the way the bathroom was designed — you'd wake up in the morning and not know where you were because these were rigorously identical products. They're called commodity products.
And the more social media allowed choice criteria and information, the more people wanted to break free from what was imposed on them. In fact, we imposed on our clients what was important to us — we hadn't woken up. The 2000s forced us to wake up, to say our clients are fed up with these standardized products. Can we respond to them with different design, colors, local culture, local architecture? That's why we went into all these lifestyle brands. That doesn't mean the first ones are dead — it just means you need to give them complementary products.
It's funny because there are one or two sectors that jump out at me when you say this, and they haven't fully made their transformation. I'm thinking of banking, but actually I find that many of these big companies remain commodities. They don't understand that you can do better. Social media and the internet have improved so many things.
Ultimately, yes, it revolutionized everything. That is to say, the client could finally express what they wanted. So we reversed the lens — we had imposed something that was mass market, we're going to try to implement what the client actually wants. But you know, I keep thinking of someone — when we talk about banking and so on, look at the postal world. Look at the revolution that was started by Jean-Paul Bailly and then Philippe Val. It's absolutely remarkable. Something where there's less and less mail, they managed to pivot to a customer relationship, to home help services. Frankly, in a French administration too, there are fortunately counter-examples where people woke up and remarkably reorganized.
It's true that they were really shaken up by competition. I mean, honestly, my postman is still the one who can't be bothered to come up to my place, whereas UPS and DHL always come up. But the village postman — he knows the entire social fabric, every year, in small villages. In big cities it's different.
You're right, you're right. Leave Paris — and I come back — I leave Paris a lot, I'm not from here. So if I go back a bit to talk about my postman, or our receptionists, managers, restaurateurs in your businesses... you were talking about 120,000 people out of 350,000 — that means 33% turnover?
Well, it's 33%, actually it's 25%, because we open 300 new hotels per year. These 300 hotels require 50,000 new people. So 120,000 minus 50,000 makes 70,000. 70,000 out of 350,000 makes 20%. So we have between 20 and 25% of people who leave per year, and we need between 30,000 and 60,000 new people for new hotels. It's staggering. No, it's incredible.
That's why I try to talk about it as much as possible now, because when you see this tech world surrounding us, which is wonderful — I'm not saying otherwise — but this ability for a group... okay, I'll go to another anecdote that's been on my mind for 4 months and on which I want to find the solution, and I know I won't find it alone. The hospitality and tourism industry is the second-largest industry in the world in size, the first being media and technology. We're much more significant than the pharmaceutical world, the automotive world, and the banking world in terms of wealth. It's approximately 10% of global GDP and 11% of jobs worldwide — it's travel and tourism. It's gigantic.
What people don't realize is that 20% of jobs created in the last 5 years are in tourism and hospitality. 20%. That means we'll take an ever-growing share. But there's something that drives me crazy, because we know it and we must find the solution — we haven't found it yet. The World Bank alerted everyone and asked if we could help with the following: in exactly 10 years, in developing countries — meaning all of Southeast Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa — there will be 1.2 billion young people entering the labor market, between 18 and 25 years old. 1.2 billion.
The local economies of these countries can currently provide at most 400 million jobs. So there will be 800 million young people who are disadvantaged, many of whom of course didn't do secondary education because they couldn't afford it or there was no university nearby, who will be unemployed in exactly 10 years. And we know well that when you think further ahead, the consequences of all this youth without jobs in the countries I just mentioned — it's many things: immigration, violence, delinquency, everything we know.
And so they reached out to Accor, telling us you're one of the five groups that employs the most people. I listened and thought maybe I could handle 1 million, 2 million — but 800 million, I don't know how to handle that. And I would really like it not to be just the privileged, the so-called modern economies that wake up. It's great to create tech groups, but all these tech groups we admire don't create jobs, never meet their clients, and especially don't want to create jobs because it would destroy their margins.
Yet we have a population of 8 billion people on the planet, and we all have to get to work. So it's not at all a cry from the heart, but... and why am I here? Because Accor surely has part of the answer — or at least hospitality and tourism surely has part of the answer. To respond to that, I've explained to many governments: I'm willing to build many hotels in sub-Saharan Africa, we started 4-5 years ago. But for that, you need a transport network, infrastructure, airports, highways, roads — you need to access the hotel. 5G partly solves connectivity, I'm not sure about Starlink, but infrastructure is very important.
The region of the world that interests me most isn't so much the one affected — it's India. India is the most populous country in the world, and in 20 years it will be where there's the most tourism and hospitality. Today it's the United States; in 3-4 years it'll be China; in 15 years it'll be India. And when you look at what the Indian government is doing, it's absolutely remarkable — they're spending tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure. They started with telecom, then healthcare, finance, and now they're building an entire airport and road network to boost tourism. So we have 10 years to think about this, but not more than 10 years. So anyone listening — I don't know what you can do with me, even if you have good ideas — I want to find jobs for these 800 million young people to whom no one will lend a hand.
What's interesting when you think about it is that you were talking about tech companies — they're now trying to fire people to increase their margins, as you said. They don't like having too many employees. But there were also practices that are now fairly public — firing 5% of employees every year just to say they're cutting underperformers, because people wanted to stay at Google, Meta, in most of these big groups because there were favorable conditions, high salaries, stock options, etc. So we're talking about 5%, and you're more like 25% — that's staggering.
Well, it's very good that people who we could give a helping hand had the desire and means to go elsewhere. That's not exactly what I meant to say. But what I would learn from this — what I find hard is that when you have continuous training, when an employee joins a company and leaves after a year, it kills me, because that's when they start being efficient.
So how do you set up an organization — for all those listening who also have big companies — that lets you onboard them efficiently, accelerate their training, help them immerse themselves in the business as quickly as possible, but also how do you let them leave? We talk about onboarding and offboarding — and they say 'I loved it, it was a great brand' — because it's important too. When 120,000 or several tens of thousands of people leave, they need to have a good image of you and speak well of your company.
First of all, the 25% turnover — in France we're probably at about 3%. So it's especially in these countries where people want to try something else. From the moment you reached out to them first — it's a question of method, a question of local autonomy. I'll say this: I left the world of finance for one reason. When you have a bit of success in finance, you can't answer a fairly simple question: was I lucky or am I intelligent? And many people in finance believe they're intelligent when they were purely lucky.
You're putting words on something that... yeah, lucky or smart. And I was tired of not being able to answer that question. It doesn't mean I've answered it today, two years later, but I wanted to move to the other side, saying 'let's stop criticizing, let's do something.' And so why am I telling you this — that autonomy given to local managers, they're the ones who onboard these people, who help them evolve in their careers. I think the key point is: can we put a name on a person? Can we recognize, identify, thank a person?
It's not a number. People who leave often do so because they weren't listened to, because they weren't heard, because they weren't identified, because their career wasn't facilitated — they do the same job for 6 years and they can't take it anymore. As soon as you take an interest in the person working next to you, that person is less likely to leave. You don't have to grant every wish, but if you at least listened and heard them, you've done three-quarters of the work. And that's why I left. I love the 350,000 people I work with, I know quite a few of them, and I hope I've responded to some of them.
But this life journey — that's why I'm lucky and I've never had red tape. My eight life journeys mean I have doubts but no fear. And I'd like to try to spread that to others. But there's just one thing — there was a question asked a year and a half ago that I answered foolishly saying it was nonsense. The question was: 'Sébastien, we're in 120 countries, we were very fast, very far, very strong hopefully. What do we have in common between employees of the group who are in Africa and those who are in Chile, Peru, or Laos?'
And so I answered foolishly: 'I don't think we have anything in common.' And that was a mistake on my part. And the guy says: 'No, but let me try to understand what the common thread is between 120 countries.' So they took 6 months, and after 6 months we had 56,000 verbs from teams all over the world, and we arrived at a purpose that I love. It's better in English but we don't care, we'll do it in French, which says: 'Accor, artisan-pioneer of a responsible hospitality, making cultures dialogue with passion and generosity.'
And when I gave this to the board of directors, the board said — exactly what I could have said 15 years ago — 'No, this is nonsense. Three words are missing from the purpose: there's no growth, no performance, and no results.' And I replied: 'That proves I've changed in 12 years.' And I answered: 'You're completely wrong. If you're an artisan-pioneer of a responsible hospitality, making cultures dialogue with passion and generosity, don't worry — results will follow, growth will follow.'
There's a kind of human warmth in this group that's incredible. People like each other, people respect each other, people trust each other. It's rare. So the common thread is there. And the more I thank the people next to me, the better I'll keep them. I like that because I must confess I was a bit in the camp where purpose, mission — 'come on, you're tiring me.' And actually when you understand it and manage to spread it, it's something very powerful.
It's very powerful. Five years ago we started with something I found truly wonderful, which was 'Feel Valued' — just two words. Feeling important, feeling recognized. And it's true for an employee, it's true for a client. When you arrive at an Accor hotel — and I say this — we may not have the best bathrooms, maybe not the best locations, maybe not the best brands, but we have the best smiles. The people of the group who welcome you at 2 a.m. or 10 a.m. — for 99.9% of them, they're wonderfully generous, authentic, and sincere. That's why I love 4,000 hotels.
The problem is now they recognize you, so of course they might smile more at you than at someone else. If you want, you give us a wild card and we'll go to all your hotels and make a nice report at each one.
Yes, exactly — we'll be very happy. In the most... you know, when I see all the experiences I can have at your places, in the most delicate areas... when you were talking about 3% in France, I imagine in the US, maybe in certain places it's a bit the same — you sense that when you become CEO of a CAC 40 company, you have a relationship with unions and management.
I felt in New York, in this hotel, that maybe in the restaurant specifically, it was a bit... you know, old-timers who'd been there for a long time.
But American unions are much more complicated than French unions, because on top of that it's... it's an insider system, it's very complicated. The French unions — when I was appointed to head Accor, first of all many people at Accor hated me: 'You're a financier, a financier' — I was awful, it was rough. The beginning was complicated. And so I went to see them. I knew them well because they were already on the board and I had been a representative of a shareholder group.
And I said to them without having thought about it one thing, and we've never deviated from it in 12 years. I said: 'You know, I'm fairly certain that for the past 5-6 years, when there was a decision to make in the group, there was one document for the board of directors, one document for financial analysts, and one document for the unions. They weren't exactly the same paragraphs or the same pages, because we didn't want to tell everything to these three different organizations.'
I said to them: 'I'm going to make you a promise. Starting tomorrow morning, 100% of the information I give to the board or the finance department, I won't soften a single word or paragraph. I'm going to tell everything. The problem is, if I do that, what I want to do — I only ask one thing of you: never betray me.' And you're going to have a role that will be paradoxical and complicated: you'll be keepers of many secrets about where I want to take this group, how I want to lead it, over what time frame, with what constraints.
And you won't have the chance to share all those details with those you represent. That's actually one of the difficult things about French law — it asks them to be there and represent people, but they can't say everything. Well, not a single one of them has betrayed me in 12 years. I tell them everything.
So this notion of transparency — it doesn't mean I have all their trust. It just means we know what each person's role is. And so my relationship with them is not only peaceful but one I enjoy, because they push back, because they don't necessarily agree with me. But we never work against each other. There's a boundary between pushing back, not agreeing, and not betraying.
Is there ever a moment when you push through and say, 'Well, yes, but it's going to be this way' or the reverse?
Not necessarily. The boundary is between long-term, short-term, and wide-term. I'm in the long-term; they're in the immediacy of wage negotiations, benefits, and so on. So you have to find this boundary, saying what's good for the company that isn't necessarily good right away for the employees, nor necessarily for the shareholders. I'm building something over 5-10 years. Maybe I have the advantage of an incredible ability to project into the long-term.
And I went to see — I'm talking about this somewhat spontaneously — when I arrived at Accor, a month after, because things weren't going very well, I went to see someone you absolutely must interview, one of the men for whom I have the most admiration, named Joël de Rosnay, who is the vice president of the Academy of Sciences. Joël de Rosnay is not only an authority figure, he has an incredible kind of benevolence and intelligence. He told me 11 years ago: 'You know, Sébastien, we got AI completely wrong. We should have called it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Artificial is anxiety-inducing on top of everything, and it's not artificial at all.'
And he's right — when you talk to people in AI today, everyone acknowledges it was the wrong semantics. So I go see him and I say: 'Listen, Joël, here I am at the head of Accor now, we don't know each other that well. I need you to explain to me — because there's great wisdom in you — how I'm going to manage the short-term and the long-term.' And he answers me with this incredible line. He says: 'Sébastien, that's the wrong question. What matters is you won't be able to answer that question until you understand wide-time.' I say, 'What's wide-time?'
He says: 'Sébastien, wide-time is your personal library. It's the books you've read, the films you've seen, the people you've met, the geographies you've discovered. It's your library. The denser your library, the better you'll manage short-term and long-term.' It's incredible.
That's the moment where I'd say: Sébastien, you need to listen to some podcasts, because I have real gems for your wide-time that I'd recommend.
And I've always thought of Joël on how to manage this short-term and long-term, because it was buried in me — I knew it was important for the group and maybe partly thanks to my wide-time.
That's super interesting and very inspiring. If I come back to what you told me about the US, for example — that's something we don't really understand, those unions over there. Why is it more complicated, more delicate?
Because they don't want to move. It was very tied to seniority — someone who's been there 30, 40 years. Because they don't want to challenge themselves. Because it's completely captured by a management organization above the people you're dealing with. There's an immovable quality, there's little listening. There's a mobster-like nature at times — some people use that word — and on top of that, unions get bought out. To buy social peace, you acquire a union — it's full of examples not to follow.
What's potentially quite delicate in a group with many employees — maybe the majority — is that you have cooks, cleaning women, cleaning men, lots of people who in certain countries earn very little money and who are in direct contact. What always strikes me is when guests show up, especially in certain hotels, and flaunt their wealth — beautiful cars, the last time at the Fouquet's, I saw a Ferrari running to warm up the engine, I think, with the keys inside and no one around.
And behind the hotel there's an area where all the employees' scooters are parked, probably most of them from France. That's something to manage.
Yes, it is something to manage, and it manages itself quite naturally.
Very... I've asked myself the question many times — this relationship or paradox between the one who pays and has a lot of money and the one who serves them, sometimes with a tip. That's especially true for what I'm most attentive to: housekeepers and restaurant servers. The way a person leaves their plate — it's very strange because despite this enormous financial gap, the benevolence continues among my employees. There's no judgment, there's no reluctance. It's done with great professionalism.
But COVID taught us something: we kept these people too long in their respective jobs with probably too many schedule constraints, probably not paid enough. We didn't identify them, we didn't thank them, we didn't recognize them. It took COVID to remind us, for these people to leave, for us to say: 'My God, why had we never recognized or identified them?' So I hope we're doing better today than before — I'm almost sure.
