Do the Experimental Group's lifestyle hotels attract a large business clientele?
Romée de Goriainoff - Indeed, since it represents between 40% and 60% of our hotel occupancy. Business travellers have a rather cold image. But today, some of this clientele, particularly in the tech, fashion and investment fund sectors, want to be able to stay in our hotels. frequent the same places as leisure travellers rather than specifically business establishments. With our lively bars, restaurants and hotels for chilling out and working, we're exactly what people want when they're on the move.
And this applies just as much to your urban hotels in Paris and London as it does to your leisure establishments?
R. de G. - Here too, the business clientele is very present in these hotels, for seminars or management committees. MICE is important for filling the wings of the season. Thanks to the many events we host from January to March and from October to December, our de Biarritz is no longer closed during the low season, and the Montesol in Ibiza is also open. The Experimental Chalet Val d'Isère, which opens at the end of the year, should also be able to count on a very strong MICE clientele, compared with our hotel in Verbier, Switzerland, where January is the second month in terms of sales.
(c) Geraldine Martens
So is the MICE clientele an essential target for your hotels?
R. de G. - Yes, we do. And we intend to develop this segment at sea and in the mountains. Our full-time sales team is responsible for developing partnerships, special offers and packages. More broadly, we work with both leisure and business travel agencies. Particularly in the United States, where our customer base is made up of three large blocks with 30% of Americans, 20% of French and between 15 and 20 % of British, the rest being more scattered. But we've also been able to develop good relations with a clientele that hotels rarely think about, the Australians, who love our concept. As well as having substantial means, this clientele is interesting because it travels against the traditional flow, when the hotels are not full. And these travellers often stay longer for their business meetings in London or Paris.
Turning to the Experimental Group, how many hotels do you offer?
R. de G. - Today, the Experimental Group's portfolio consists of 15 hotels in France, Italy, Spain and the UK, with several more in the pipeline. We will soon be opening a hotel in Rome, near the Via Veneto, which will focus on leisure but will also have a small business clientele. Alongside our two Paris hotels - Grands Boulevards and Grand Pigalle Experimental - we will soon have two other establishments with a project in the Marais and another in the Sixth Arrondissemente arrondissement, a five-star hotel on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain, due to open at the end of 2025. At the same time, we also plan to open a hotel in New York, which should be very similar to those we have in Paris, both leisure and business, with around a hundred rooms. This first step in the United States will undoubtedly lead to others, with a development strategy dedicated to this market. Ahead of that, we have just opened a wine bar in New York and will shortly be re-opening a cocktail bar there.
What are your strengths in attacking the American market? That French lifestyle feel?
R. de G. - We think that we have a good chance to play on the other side of the Atlantic. The lifestyle hotel industry was certainly born in New York, but today it is either very low end or too high end. We can bring something specialour sense of design, service and catering. The beauty of the United States is that everything moves very quickly. You can quickly have a hundred or so hotels.
Apart from these ambitions across the Atlantic, do you have any other avenues for development, particularly in Europe?
R. de G. - We're still looking to increase our presence in London, even though the market seems to me to be less dynamic than in Paris. Other destinations under consideration include Milan, Madrid and Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Zurich and, perhaps, Budapest. Developing the brand in Asia, where we have a project in Singapore, is also one of our ambitions. As for leisure and MICE hotels, we have a project under way in Comporta, south of Lisbon, and we are looking at opportunities on the Côte d'Azur, in Provence and around Lake Como.
How is Experimental Group building its growth?
R. de G. - We have three areas of development These include repositioning sleepy hotels that fit in with our concept, such as the Montesol hotel in Ibiza, taking over existing hotels such as those in Biarritz and Val d'Isère and, finally, our traditional focus on buying up ageing office buildings and hotels that need to be completely refurbished. This is linked to our relationship with the Brookflied investment fund, with which we have raised a fair amount of money. Apart from putting a few small tickets into the hotels, in the region of T€51 to T€101, Experimental's aim is not to own the premises or the business, but simply to take over the management of these hotels. A bit like Marriott or Accor.
How do you position yourself in relation to these major groups, almost all of whom have made lifestyle their hobbyhorse?
R. de G. - We are smaller, more independent, but above all very operational, whereas these groups are more focused on distribution and franchising. We want to manage the hotels as if we owned them, to offer the best results to our owners, but also to ensure that the Experimental brand, which we are increasingly promoting, is not diluted. All these major groups have unbeatable distribution networks and the ability to roll out concepts quickly, but they do so by signing contracts all over the world, it's a bit of a brand breaker. In an Experimental hotel, you are sure to find a chef behind the kitchen who has something to say, an extensive wine list that varies from destination to destination, and a real cocktail bar. We don't reduce our offer to the bare bones just so we can duplicate it excessively. Each project is carefully thought out and always different. What we do industrialise, however, is the process of creating the hotels so that, in the end, we can be as artisanal as possible in our contact with our customers.
We've seen small lifestyle groups merging with or being absorbed by hotel leaders. Is this a possible outcome for Experimental Group, or even a goal?
R. de G. - We have the capital to grow and the capacity to sign around ten hotels a year. So we can easily reach 80 or 100 hotels worldwide. But, it's true sometimes tempting to think that we could become affiliated to or be bought out in part by a very large group and benefit from their power. In this case, not necessarily to take advantage of their distribution strength to acquire new customers, but of their development network and their relations with investors. They have the commercial power to sell their brands that we don't have. When you affiliate with Hilton or Marriott, you know that they are going to open 100 in the United States. However, even if you should never say never, we are still young, with a lot of things to do. We can remain independent for a very long time.
