Accor Hotels to Sell 450 properties

It has been announced that Accor Hotels, the French accommodation chain, is planning to sell 450 of its properties between now and 2013. They say that this is all part of an ongoing restructuring of the company’s portfolio.

The sale of these hotels is expected to give Accor €1.6 billion more in cash, which represents more than 25% of the company’s 1,600 properties. On a normalized, yearly basis, the sales will result in a €150 million to €200 million decline in revenue, while adjusted net debt is anticipate to fall by €200 million to €300 million per year.

Accor chief executive Gilles Pélisson said that the company is going to increase its number of rooms by 2015 to 700,000, a 40% increase, which will mostly be done through management contracts and franchising. Additionally, they plan to sell 450 hotel buildings during the next 4 years, which will leave the company with 20% of real estate owned, rather than 40%.

Pélisson continued that Accor Hotels is moving from being the owner of hotels to the top manager of hotels. They will offer all the know-how of building and operating hotels, as well as training staff, he added, which many franchisers don’t have.

Accor Hotels operates 384,000 rooms in its network, where the rooms are owned, under management contracts or leased. They are also in the process of demerging their two core businesses – services and hotels. This will result in the creation of a new company they will call Accor Services, which will be listed on the NYSE-Euronext Paris stock exchange this July.