“I always wanted to be a chef,” Accor Group Chief Technology Officer Floor Bleeker admitted. “And I think, secretly, I still want to be a chef sometimes. I love cooking.” However, he drew the line regarding his undergraduate internship at Hotelschool The Hague, saying he’d do anything but cooking and cleaning to meet the practical application requirements. One position was available in a hotel’s IT department, which Bleeker took despite acknowledging he had no background skills in tech. Within a week, his boss left and Bleeker was told he had to take over. “I was really thrown into the deep end, but I loved it so much and I’ve never looked back,” he shared.
Bleeker said that understanding four critical components—hospitality, business, people and technology—is a winning combination. From those elements, “I think you have the perfect mix of doing a CTO job for a hotel company.”
His undergraduate hospitality education and an MBA in marketing from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs gave him a solid foundation for a steady progression through hospitality IT roles, beginning with IT manager at Radisson Blu to VP of business solutions with Jumeirah Group, chief information officer with Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts and then president of Hospitality Technology Next Generation. He moved to Accor as CIO MEA and global strategic programs in 2018 and into the group CTO role in 2020. He was named a 2024 inductee to the Hospitality Technology Hall of Fame in May, recognized for his service in innovating hospitality in the EMEA region.
Tech as a Strategy Driver
For Bleeker, tech is at the heart of Accor’s business strategy. "Technology is a key driver for our core," he explained. “For our owners, for our franchisees, it is very key that we bring them top-of-the-line revenue management, distribution, loyalty, [and] security.” Bleeker acknowledges that this is no different than any of the other large hotel chains. However, the “huge refresh” of Accor’s technology that is currently underway involves streamlining systems to the cloud, where the company is going from multiple different systems that were on-property in hotels and in data centers around the world to a single public cloud and use of SAAS providers. “Once we have that, then our data is in one place, our securities are in one place. And that is the absolute key ingredient for getting the most out of AI for example. We think that the future is really here.”
With AI, Bleeker said, “we see some sweet spots,” noting that Accor’s back-office operations are already benefiting from smart automation, robotic process automation and some AI to increase efficiency. “Once we have these common platforms, you can do a lot more functionality. It could be with AI or it could be just new technology that we find along the way. It's much easier with cloud systems in one place to deploy that at scale because we're big and geographically distributed.”
Wider expansion into North America has been a goal for Accor, though the company’s core tech strategy remains unchanged regardless of the locale.
“The beauty of tech is that it's not so different wherever you go,” Bleeker said, highlighting that Accor is organized around regions: four large regions, and four luxury brands that have their own organization, except for technology—"because we decided to build a shared service and have that shared service available to all hotels worldwide. So it's not that the U.S. gets a different treatment from China or the Middle East or Europe. And by doing that, we actually leveraging skills from around the world. We have large tech centers in Paris, Bangkok and Bangalore, for example. This allows us to attract the right talent in the right place. … I don't think that our expansion in the U.S. will make it as a very different strategy from elsewhere in the world. Where we are unique [is that] we're not American. So when we compete with some of the other large brands that are mostly American, we bring experience that we have from around the world into the United States. And I think that can really make a difference.” As an example, Bleeker noted payment platforms. “In many places in the world, payment is a much easier, much more secure topic than it is in the United States, where we still rely often on numbers and signatures. And we bring that to our hotels; it is very much appreciated.”
Tech as a Sustainability Topic
Accor’s European roots mean they will feel the effects of sustainability regulations before hotels in the U.S. will, but Bleeker sees technology as a way to help the hospitality industry do better in any location. “There [are] few areas where tech can play a very key part in the next three years,” he said. “We don't know what we improve if we don't measure it, so there need to be ways to figure out how much energy we use, how much food we waste, what green energy we use, how much it costs, etc.”
Secondly, he said, Accor Tech uses a lot of energy on its own. “We have big data centers, we use a lot of computers. Migrating to public cloud solutions and using efficient technology on shared platforms means that dedicated platforms are not buzzing 24 hours just for you. It's really the difference between taking the bus to work or taking a private car to work.” The energy used is about the same, he explained, but passengers must share a bus with many people and a car with relatively few. “With cloud computing, it's exactly the same.”
The third factor is the energy consumption in hotels. For example, smart thermostats and the Internet of Things can help hoteliers know whether a room is occupied or not and adjust the air conditioning accordingly. “There is a huge opportunity there,” Bleeker said. “And then you have things like electric-vehicle chargers that need to be deployed in a proper way so that we attract and supply the right energy. Whatever it is, I think technology is going to play a super important part in this sustainability challenge.”
Tech as a Business Issue
“Technology is not a technology issue alone anymore. Technology is a business issue,” Bleeker stated. “Many of the companies that operate in hospitality almost become technology companies because they are so reliant on it to provide their services.”
A current AHLA T100 member, Bleeker said his work with the association is very close to his heart. “AHLA has real lobbying capabilities. So if there is something that we need to push, when it comes to regulation … they can take it to the White House. That means that we have a seat at a table and that these regulations are not just being pushed down, but that we have an opportunity to give input, as well.”
“America is a little bit of a bubble where you have one government, one currency, one language. You have, in the rest of the world, another 110 countries where Accor operates that are all different, so we're working hard to see how we can export some of those capabilities to other places in the world as well,” he continued. “There's new regulation in China for data protection, for example; there is AI regulation ... in the E.U. It would really help if we can come together under one umbrella as an industry and be a discussion partner to the governments when they put these regulations in place, so they don't harm us and that we do it in the right way when it gets to the industry.”
This article was originally published in the June edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.