French founder of Accor international hotel group dies aged 91
Gérard Pélisson, who co-founded the Accor hotel group and turned the business into the world's sixth largest hotel chain, has died at the age of 91 after a long illness, according to his family.
Issued on:
Pélisson created the Accor company together with his business partner Paul Dubrule and grew it into the world's sixth largest hotel group with 5,400 hotels in 100 countries under the Novotel, Ibis, Sofitel, Mercure and Pullman brands.
Pélisson's studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and first job at IBM gave him valuable insights into US-style entrepreneurship.
He left IBM after developing a fascination with America's standardised model of hotel businesses, hoping to start something similar in France.
"He was the prototype of an entrepreneur," said Accor's current CEO, Sebastien Bazin, crediting Pélisson and Dubrule with "reinventing the rules" of France's hotel sector and "putting it on a new course of international influence".
The Holiday Inn brand, in particular, captured the two men's attention, with its hotels located on the fringes of cities and offering near-identical rooms at bargain rates.
Pélisson and Dubrule opened their first Novotel in 1967. The hotel, built on a former beetroot field close to a motorway on the outskirts of Lille, in northern France, was an instant success.
Within two years, they had launched two more, in the eastern city of Colmar and Marseille in the south. An Ibis hotel followed in 1974 in Bordeaux, in France's southwest, the starting point for a network of budget hotels first in France, and then across Europe.
Their company, SIEH, invested in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas, and was renamed Accor in 1983.
'Legendary shouting matches'
Their marketing methods included campaigns such as "A room for 99 francs" (15 euros) at the low-cost Formule1 chain, still doing business as hotelF1.
"We managed to create all the great projects because we were in agreement," Pélisson once said of his business partnership.
Their biographer, Henry Lang, said the two men enjoyed "a great complicity and extraordinary mutual respect". They also had "legendary shouting matches", he said, "but only ever in private".
Lang noted that Pélisson could "lie through his teeth" during negotiations, "but it was always for the benefit of Accor". He always kept his word, the biographer added.
Pélisson and Dubrule left Accor's executive management in 1997 after an acquisition spree that began to weigh on the group's finances, but co-led the supervisory board until 2005.
Pélisson loved good food and in 1998 teamed up with celebrity chef Paul Bocuse to take over the cooking school that later became the Paul Bocuse Institute.
Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morning
Subscribe