Accorhotels.com, the multi-brand reservation website for Accor hotels, is now available in Arabic. “Accor is firmly strengthening and investing in its digital strategy to create a permanent, direct and interactive guest relationship,” says Jean-Luc Chrétien, Accor executive vice-president sales and distribution. “Accorhotels.com is the spearhead of our digital ecosystem.”
The Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, is an important outbound market for Accor, which has extensive expansion plans in the pipeline. Arabic is the fifth most-used language in the world and an official language in more than 20 countries with approximately 422 million speakers, according to figures from The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
By creating an Arabic version of Accorhotels.com, Accor reaches this significant market with numerous business opportunities for the domestic and outbound markets. According to the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), outbound travel from the Middle East has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years. With 30 hotels currently under development, the group is firmly committed towards achieving its targets of 100 hotels by 2016, opened or engaged, for the Middle East.
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 and so on will be specifically adapted in Arabic. Accor will also set up dedicated Arabic call centre 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 senior vice-president of e-commerce, says: “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 per cent in 2014.”