Accor | Cvent Transient Leisure RFP Tool
Introduction
Accor is a French multinational hospitality company that owns, manages, and franchises hotels, resorts, and vacation properties. Accor is the largest hotel group in the world outside of the United States.
The worldwide hotel operator comprises of more than 5,100 hotels spanning 110 countries and 39 brands, from luxury to economy. Some of those brands include ibis, Sofitel, Orient Express and Raffles.
Accor and Cvent worked together to optimise Accor’s RFP management as well as introduce new tools and methods of revolutionising the way they work on a day-to-day basis, which would ultimately which allow them to strengthen their position as a world-leading hospitality brand. The group also recently launched its new lifestyle loyalty programme which is ALL - Accor Live Limitless.
The Challenge
As the hospitality and tourism industries begin to recover in terms of business and domestic travel, Accor needed a way to not only improve their RFP process, but also gain a competitive advantage. They needed to simplify B2B contracting for hotels and improve their current solution.
Before adoping Cvent’s RFP Leisure Tool, Accor was using an outdated legacy solution built 15 years prior as well as many emails. The system required hard deployment and was unscalable. In addition, the user experience was not at today's standards.
“We decided to change our contracting tool as our legacy one was quite outdated,” Anaëlle Besset, Project Manager at Accor said. “We wanted to improve our user experience and align the B2B processes. It was important to make the hotels work in the same system for corporate and leisure.”
The Solution
Cvent worked with Accor to enable the management of leisure RFPs. The tool has a similar workflow to the Cvent’s Corporate RFP Tool; “An account manager can solicit properties to participate in a Leisure solicitation, hotels can pick pre-defined rate plans to respond, and adapt content on the fly,” Besset said.
Accor is the first hospitality group to roll out the new solution out to its properties, starting from 15 April, 2021. The all-new leisure RFP product facilitates the end-to-end tracking of leisure contract creation, from making inquiries to hotels to charging rates in CRS and PMS. All the contract details are available in the CRM tool. This integration provides hotels and sales teams with 360°vision of sales activity in order to provide a high level of service to B2B customers.
To begin with, Cvent scoped Accors needs in remote meetings where they explored what Accor needed, what they wanted to achieve and agreed on what the project was going to look like. What followed was a three-day discovery workshop in Paris and Dallas.
After the setup, Cvent held regular demos and ad hoc meetings and monthly catch ups to help Accor get used to the Leisure Tool. “We actually are in contact on a daily basis to make sure we are on the right track,” Zucher mentioned.
The Benefits
The launch of this new digital solution represents a competitive advantage by enabling a streamlined B2B inquiry from start to finish. The solution is available to 3,500 leisure-focused hotels in the 5,100+ properties that make up the Accor Group. “The experience is upgraded from an RFP management tool to a full B2B contracting solution,” said Besset. “It is basically a gateway from the RFP management to the distribution.”
The tool also offers them the functionality hotel managers and sales teams need to accelerate industry recovery and growth in this segment.
“The contracting process is now 100% digital and we are ready for enhanced distribution, ready for a shift from Static to Dynamic rates, ready to shorten the time to market.”
