Hotel giant Accor is partnering with Amadeus for a new central reservations system (CRS).
The goal is to have the first hotel live on the system in a year, and France-based Accor is prioritizing luxury properties in North America to migrate first.
In 2022, Accor announced it would use D-Edge, a technology company it acquired back in 2019, to operate its CRS. The company had announced Sabre as its partner for a property management and CRS in early 2020, but the partnership was taken off the table when the pandemic hit.
Alix Boulnois, chief digital officer of Accor, said, “The plan has never been for D-Edge to really expand in the enterprise segment. They’re really focused on mid-sized regional chains. We did a move two years ago to give our current CRS to D-Edge while we were looking for the right one.”
Boulnois added that Accor will continue evolving with D-Edge until the migration, which is expected to take a couple of years, is complete.
The company announced it would be using Oracle’s Opera Cloud as its PMS in late 2021 with a significant part of the portfolio already migrated.
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Speaking on the CRS partnership with Amadeus, Boulnois described it as a “business program.”
“While we’re talking about technology, what we want to drive is incremental value, and the CRS from Amadeus has some capabilities that will help us unlock some business that we have struggled to capture today digitally.”
She cited elements such as multi-room bookings and groups as key functionality required from the system as well as attribute-based selling and the ability to personalize stays.
Boulnois also said Accor is anticipating “faster time to market, greater reliance and scalability of the system” at a time when hotels are seeking new revenue opportunities.
This is an expansion of the relationship between the two companies, which have worked together in the past across areas including distribution and business intelligence at property as well as wider group level.
Amadeus signed IHG as the first partner for its CRS back in 2015 with Marriott International announcing a similar deal in late 2021. Meanwhile, Hyatt recently partnered with Sabre for a CRS.
Commenting on the need for hotels to upgrade their technology, Francisco Pérez-Lozao Rüter, president of hospitality for Amadeus, said, “Some large and mid-sized players are sitting on their own in-house technology. It’s phenomenally complex and expensive to develop these things, and we see a trend more toward working with partners, more outsourced.”
Pérez-Lozao Rüter added hotel groups are seeing a 10-fold increase in shopping volumes from one year to the next on the system, “so you can see the stress coming.”
He also shared that Amadeus has an undisclosed mid-sized hotel group in the pipeline.
