Sebastien Bazin's 1400 days in office and 4 more stories
FIRST 1400 DAYS OF SEBASTIEN BAZIN
AccorHotels is changing from being an old hotel chain with little to no future into something the hotel industry hasn't seen yet. Since 2013 when Bazin took the reigns (after having led multiple investments into Accor on behalf of Colony Capital) the company has slowly but surely changed into what is most probably the most innovative hotel chain on the market. How hotel chains will look in a few years from now isn't certain, but what is certain is that doing more of what has been done in the last 50 years is a slow route to irrelevance. in 2017, the only chain that is showing it must change is AccorHotels and this timeline is a great reminder of how much.
YOU CAN'T OVER-SELL... FYRE FESTIVAL
This weekend what was to be the festival of the rich and beautiful turned to a disaster that would make Glastonbury's mud look like a trip to the spa. So while many were blaming the influencer marketing for instagraming and tweeting about it, I think it is more a tale, not of over-selling but under-delivering. I strongly believe that you can't over-sell, if you can deliver. Lying isn't selling or marketing, it's... lying. Fyre Festival is like a modern and real-life version of "The Producers" by Mel Brooks, nobody in their right mind wouldn't know that the organization was that bad until 24h before the opening. In my opinion, they didn't over-sell, they lied. And what was at fault with the marketing was that they kept going, knowing it was going to be a disaster.
VIRTUAL REALITY IN HOTELS
HOTELs Magazine's Barbara Bohn recently did quite some work on virtual reality (VR) for hotels. I had a few words to say in her study and I honestly don't see VR as a major marketing tool, yet. Where I think it definitely has a spot, is on trade shows, with travel agents and other places where the infrastructure can be set-up and people can sit down and watch. But there's a lot more than just my opinion in this article and I would recommend people make their own.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VR AND AR?
Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are buzzwords the tech industry is throwing around quite a lot these days. But what do they really mean and how do they differentiate (other than the goggles). This infographic does side by side comparison and you know by now how much I like simple explanations.
TRAVEL TECH HACKATHON IN TRAVEL
Hack Horizon has organized a travel tech hackathon and it's happening 30,000 feet (10,000 meters for us) in the air. It's no secret that travel needs more innovation, and especially hotel tech. While there's a good amount of stuff happening on the more scalable guest facing end of tech, I'd love to see some stuff happening on the business side.