To “regain financial capacity” following two years health crisis and adapt to “very inflationary operating costs” linked to rising wages and energy prices, the CEO from Accor called this Friday hoteliers who manage the establishments of the group to “frankly raise their prices”.
Presenting on Friday “the highlights in 2021” at the group’s general meeting of shareholders, Sébastien Bazin spoke of “the desire to voyager (which) is only accelerating” and “the prices” of the services of its hotels – Accor has some 5,300 worldwide – which “are higher than 2019”.
“We are pushing our owners to frankly raise their prices, first because they have suffered just as much as us, many of them have cash flow difficulties,” said the CEO of the world’s sixth hotel group (Novotel, Sofitel , Mercure, Ibis, Fairmont, Mövenpick, Raffles, Jo and Joe…).
Salary increase
The second reason, “is because the operating costs of a hotel are very inflationary”, due to the increase in wages and energy prices, he added. Consequently, “the only way” for “hotel owners to be able to keep margins equivalent to those of 2019 is to (…) pay more”, said Sébastien Bazin, saying he hoped that hotel prices would continue to increase. in 2023.
A wage agreement between the social partners has established since April 1 a minimum wage 5% higher than the minimum wage and an average increase of 16.33% in the wage scale, in a branch of hotel cafes restaurants (HCR) with historically high wages. bass.
The terms of directors renewed
Friday the shareholders of Accor renewed for three years the mandates of four directors, including that of the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy with 95.48% of the votes cast. On the other hand, the compensation of CEO Sébastien Bazin for the year 2021, where Accor generated a net profit of 85 million euros following having suffered in 2020 a historic loss of nearly two billion euros due to the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19, was approved with only 79.26%.
It includes a fixed compensation of 950,000 euros, to which are added a variable compensation of 1.42 million euros and 79,034 performance shares with a value of 2.37 million euros – the acquisition of which is subject to achievement of several performance criteria.
