Accor to reach a high growth market with a performing website, adapted to local specificities
Paris, France, 2014-1-8 — /travelprnews.com/ — Accorhotels.com, the multi-brand reservation website for Accor hotels, continues its development and its adaptation towards high growth markets. Now available in Arabic, the website offers a choice of 31 geo-localized versions and 16 languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian-Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Indonesian, Russian, Polish, and, newly, Arabic.
“Accor is firmly strengthening and investing in its digital strategy to create a permanent, direct and interactive guest relationship. Accorhotels.com is the spearhead of our digital ecosystem. By launching the Arabic version, Accor reiterates its position as a leader in terms of innovation” explains Jean-Luc Chrétien, Accor EVP Sales, Distribution & Loyalty.
Middle East and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are important outbound market for Accor which is leader in the region and has a strong expansion plan in the pipeline. This underlined the need to develop an Arabic website in order to be closer to its Arabic speaking guests and strengthen intra-regional ties in this region.
Arabic is the 5th most used language in the world and an official language in more than 20 countries with approximately 422 million speakers, according to figures from UNESCO (The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). By creating an Arabic version of Accorhotels.com, Accor reaches this major market with numerous business opportunities for the domestic and the outbound market. Indeed, according to the World Tourism Organization, outbound travel from the Middle-East has more than quadrupled in the last twenty years.
Accor is leader in the Middle-East with 62 hotels (15,100 rooms) and 7 brands, from economic to luxury, in 10 countries. With 30 hotels comprising over 7,000 rooms currently under development, the Group is firmly committed towards achieving its targets of 100 hotels (25,000 rooms) within 3 years for the broader Middle East.
Christophe Landais, Accor Middle-East Managing Director, explains the strategic challenge for Accor: “Adapting Accorhotels.com in Arabic is in line with the dynamic development of Accor and its distribution channels. Thanks to the new version of the booking website, Accor increases its penetration and reinforces its presence in the Middle-East zone as well as in the other Arabic-speaking countries; in order to locally sale its hotels.”
The new Arabic interface of Accorhotels.com will allow the Group to propose more relevant offers and services to its clients. The website homepage, booking engine, hotels fact sheet, etc. will be specifically adapted in Arabic. Accor will also set-up dedicated Arabic call center lines to help guests with online bookings.
Accor is among the pioneers to have its own in-house Arabic geo-localised website Accorhotels.com in the region. Romain Roulleau, Accor SVP e-Commerce, comes back on the successful achievement that is the Arabic version of Accorhotels.com: “Launching the Arabic version of Accorhotels.com was a technological challenge. We needed to keep a simple and efficient reservation tool, despite a change of display and ergonomics, adapted to the Arabic language. Already accessible worldwide, Accorhotels.com had to suit this market. Therefore, the goal was to propose a client experience in concordance with the local cultural identities. This should allow us to develop the Accorhotels.com local sales by over 50% in 2014.”
Accor, the world’s leading hotel operator and market leader in Europe, is present in 92 countries with more than 3,600 hotels and 460,000 rooms. Accor’s broad portfolio of hotel brands – Sofitel, Pullman, MGallery, Grand Mercure, Novotel, Suite Novotel, Mercure, Adagio, ibis, ibis Styles, ibis budget and hotelF1 – provide an extensive offer from luxury to budget. With more than 160,000 employees in Accor brand hotels worldwide, the Group offers its clients and partners 45 years of know-how and expertise.
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