Hospitality ON: Guaranteeing relevance in hospitality 2022 | Eric de Neef

I'm not sure that the answer is in the number of brands you have, but in the level, the relevancy of the brands you put on the market. So you follow this, we saw that this is an individual was a fantastic answer to the need of your independent hotelier. During coffee and when you see the success of it, we already have more than 60 signings of it, so it's going fast.

In the hotel industry, what we see is that your recovery is led by leisure. Clearly, the big unknown in fact is quarter four as of September, because you're going to have a shifting segment. Leisure will fade away, and then the big question mark is international travel. Big international meetings, are they coming back? Yes, no. We are optimistic presently, optimistic I would say. The experts more or less target 2024 to hit the numbers of 2019. We think we're going to hit this in 2023. We are not anymore in a survival mode, I would say. We are really in an aggressive recovery mode. There is some staff shortage, it's pretty tough to produce the service, and all the operators and all the industry should try to find the answers to that problem.

You know, we are working a lot on the image of the company. We have just launched a big recruitment campaign worldwide, and we got more than 100,000 candidates. And we are leveraging technology. We just launched an instant recruitment platform where, as a candidate, you scan a QR code, you fill in some information, not that much, and you send it. So no CV anymore, all these things. This technology helps you to connect with your targets and with this population.

It's high. It's high for your people, it's high for your partners, it's high for your customers. So you need to really be very close to them, to understand, to take care of them, to take care of their families, because it's not only the people working with you, it's the whole ecosystem around them that needs to be taken care of.

So the other trends, in my view, is that the direct booking and direct business will surpass the indirect one. I'm convinced about this. You know, my biggest partner is Google. We are working on a daily basis with them, and I'm meeting them every month. So technology will be key on this. And when you're talking about distribution, I'm convinced that the hotel industry needs to keep, of course, the core business of operations and hotel industry, but they need technology companies. And I see the technology companies at three levels: on the commercial side, on the operational side, and on your guest journey. So if you take the three, what we are doing a lot today is to reshape all the platforms that we have, being loyalty, being revenue management. We launched The Club, a totally dedicated company within the company, serving more than 200 hotels today, going to 500 by 2025, and leveraging technology when it comes to forecasting, when it comes to price accuracy. On the operational side, the same on planning, operation, performance anticipation. And then the third one, of course, technology is all guest experience. How do you facilitate the guest journey in three clicks? You book in two clicks, you modify in one click, you get your electronic key card on your iPhone. You need to be relevant, you need to be in sync with what your customer needs. And if you don't do that, you cannot engage with your customers. This is what they need.

We have announced this on the 13th of June. And you know, when you look at the growth of Radisson since 2017, when we launched the Fabia plan, we saw tremendous success in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and in Asia, where we doubled the network. We had amazing financial achievements at the EBITDA level that we never had in the past. And the success in the Americas was not at the same level. So with the shareholders, we made a strategic review: what do we need to do to mirror this success that we had in what we call the rest of the world? We reviewed many strategic options and came to the conclusion that selling the business to Choice was the best optional alternative, because you have a complementarity of segments, you have complementary geographies. They are very strong in the US, we are very strong in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. They have the biggest network from an owner perspective, but without upscale and upper-scale offer. So we think that with them driving the development of Radisson, we will be able to mirror the success we had. And you know, the Americas is the biggest urban market in the world. So the day that we have 200 Blues in the US and 100 Radisson Collection and 120 some Radissons, it will have a direct impact on our network. So that was the best approach to drive the bus forward and to grow globally the brand on both sides of the pond.

Don't forget, we are part of the Jin Jiang Group, so we have access to 45 brands today. And what we have announced yesterday on the APAC plan, where we grow, we're going to grow the network up to 1,700 hotels. We're going to do it not only with the Radisson brands, we're going to do this also with some Jin Jiang brands, with some Louvre brands, all together. So you have access to the 45 brands, you need to find the right brand to the right profile, and it doesn't need to be all global. When we launched Radisson Individuals two years ago during the pandemic in June, the Indian team came to us and said, it's fine, but we have a segment of hotels that we could cover. These are the retreats, so we would like to extend the Radisson Individual to hotels of 40, 50 keys in 30 destinations of India. We adapted three Individuals to create Individual Retreats. This is only applicable for India.

I think that people want to travel for many reasons—family, leisure, discovery, discover your culture. That will remain. It's true that we will need to find different answers to the evolving needs of our customers, but we are definitely in a blessed industry.

Thanks a lot. Thank you.