Jean-Luc Chrétien, Co-CEO of Fastbooking, sits down with Hosco to talk about the technological and digital services that his company offers independent hotels today—and why AccorHotels acquired it last year. Prior to taking the reins at Fastbooking, Chrétien worked for AccorHotels for 30 years, where he developed an expertise in hotel sales, distribution, and customer loyalty. Today he helps hotels develop their businesses on the web via two different services—technology and marketing.
Fastbooking technology creates better booking engines, manages reservations, and increases hotels’ capacity to convert online requests into actual bookings. On the marketing side, Fastbooking creates e-commerce compatible websites for independent hotels and helps them to develop marketing strategies for acquiring online customers and traffic. This, in turn, frees hotels from their dependency on online travel agencies. Chrétien explains that the strategy behind AccorHotels’ 2015 acquisition of Fastbooking is twofold. First, it was to better resist the influence of online travel agencies and to strengthen AccorHotels’ own web platform. Second, the partnership allows AccorHotels to increase their hotel offering, which is how the AccorHotels Marketplace idea was conceived.
The ambition is to offer 8’000 properties in 300 key destinations between now and 2018, according to Chrétien. The challenge for AccorHotels was in connectivity, and Fastbooking’s technology solved that issue. To learn more about the Fastbooking-AccorHotels partnership, and to find out what technologies and websites Chrétien thinks are changing and accelerating the trend of online booking today, watch the full video!
