Booking meeting rooms and bedrooms online in real time will soon be possible on the meetings.accor.com website. Over the coming months, the French group will be rolling out the GroupSync cloud solutiondeveloped by Groups360 for group bookings.
By the end of the year, the hotel group will begin by offering a digital quotation process on its MICE site. This will be followed, in early 2022, by the actual implementation of the solution that will enable the group to real-time booking of meeting spacescalled GroupSync Engage. Over the coming months, the service will be extended to include room reservations for groups. In a single online transaction, GroupSync Engage offers organisers " the possibility of reserving not only meeting space, but also room blocks, catering services and state-of-the-art audio and video equipment" as Kemp Gallineau, Managing Director of Groups360, describes it.
With this launch, Accor is reaping the rewards of its investment in technology player Groups360. A quick look back: in summer 2019, four global hotel heavyweights - Accor, Hilton, IHG and Marriott - jointly invested $50 million in Groups360. A joint initiative aimed at solve this hitherto insoluble problem online, real-time organisation of meetings and seminars.
Last March, IHG was the first of four groups à announce the launch of the GroupSync Engage solution in around thirty hotels in the United States, before Hilton announced a worldwide roll-out in June, with Accor now joining the circle of its users. " We are delighted to be working with Groups360 to launch this new product. technology set to revolutionise the meetings sector and seminars" said Markus Keller, Director of Sales and Distribution for the French group.
The MICE offer of most of its 5,200 establishments will be accessible via this solution. The same number of hotels will also be present on the GroupSync marketplaceGroupSync Engage, a marketplace that encompasses 200,000 establishments and simplifies the bidding process for organisers. Of these hotels, around 20,000 are preparing to adopt the GroupSync Engage solution by the end of 2021 to facilitate online group bookings.
