Eric de Neef (Radisson Hotel Group) "60% of our business is digital"

It's a good question. The travel trends, I would say, post-COVID, what we see is, I would say, six big trends. First, you have a demographic change. In the emerging countries, you have the middle class rising, but in the mature market, you have an aging population. So you have, in the way they travel, a balance between domestic travel and international travel.

The second thing that we see is that you have a sustainability awareness and consciousness. But it's also quite a paradox, because on one hand you want to connect with people, you want to take over the world, you want to see different cultures, and at the same time you are very conscious: can I fly? Would I fly? Because it's not very responsible or how to travel. So this is the duality we see as well in the trends.

I would say the third one is clearly technology-driven. It's digital. 60% of our business is digital. It was a huge push. If I compare it to pre-COVID, GDPR is clear. The way we use data, it was something in the past that was not raised by your customer. Now they are really focused to understand how we use the data. That's something that came out very strong after COVID.

On the fifth one, I would say that we have the need for personalization, the tailor-made offer. So we need to engage with our customer. Loyalty system and loyalty program is key for that.

And then the last one, I would say, is the pleasure and the remote working. This is a new trend where people are working from home, but from home could be everywhere in the world. And then you have, for the same customer, staying maybe two weeks with us, staying 10 days as business and five or six days as leisure. So the same customer in the same property has different needs. This is something that we need to adapt to, because in the past, from Monday to Friday it was business, and then you had your Saturday and Sunday. Now it's mixed, in what we call bleisure—an acronym of business and leisure—and this is something that is coming out very strongly.

Post-COVID, what Radisson is doing on sustainability: first, we are articulated around three pillars—Think People, Think Planet, Think Community. So when we talk sustainability, it's not only energy savings or water savings; it's going beyond. It's going to people and it's going also to community.

We have just issued the validated SBT, the Science Based Target structure, around three main pillars. The first pillar is green buildings—energy efficiency, electrification of installations, and so on. The second one is the transition to renewable energy; it's easier to implement versus green buildings. And the third one is green operations. Green operations is what we have worked on together with the sustainability department, with the brand, with the operations—from a guest experience standpoint, what we implement having a sustainable component.

I'll take one example: green housekeeping. You stay with us three nights, you don't want us to enter your room, you don't want us to change your towels or change linen. You compensate with this, but this is one of the activities. With the savings, we are sponsoring, with a partner, different activities. You have the EV charging stations. So you have a lot of activities that are really tangible for the customer. These are the three pillars we are working on.

On technology, we are doing a lot because we are very conscious that this is the driver—first, to drive sustainability, but as well to enhance the guest experience. Because when you work with technology, you improve your efficiency from a guest experience, you give control to your customer, and from an operational side, it's operational excellence because the process is quite clearly defined.

When I'm looking at what we are doing on technology, I think the biggest innovation we are doing—I'm going to name two. The first one is Choose Your Room. It's in fact coming from the airlines, where you choose your seat. In airlines, it's quite easy because it's a floor plan—you want to be on the front row, you want to be on the aisle, you want to be on the left or right of the plane. Here, when you choose a room and you say I want a premium room or I want a corner room, I need to show you. I cannot just send you a floor plan. So we are working on this very heavily, in what we call the immersive content.

With immersive content, you will be able to enter the hotel, to see the property, to walk into the property, to go to your meeting room, to go to your room, to see the room—and then we link it to revenue management, and you will be able to book directly this room on the corner of the building facing the street. That's the one I want to have. This is one of the biggest innovations that we are doing for the moment, in order to give the customer added value—to say what you're going to get is this one, because today you get the rooms that we decide to give you.