A new Milestone for Amadeus and Accor

Airbnb is one of the most disruptive websites that appeared in recent years in the hospitality distribution landscape. It is an online marketplace used to book and list spaces ranging from a single room to a whole house (or even bigger places) and its co-founders are currently in the final stages of raising capital that would make the company worth around $10 billion according to Forbes.

For comparison's sake the Wyndham Worldwide and Hyatt Hotels are respectively valued at $9.3 billion and $8.4 billion. If those sources are accurate the Airbnb valuation would make its co-founders the first billionaires of what is called the « sharing economy ».

Jeremy Rifkin, author of the “The Zero Marginal Cost Society, explains that Airbnb success is due to its almost non existent marginal costs and he extrapolates that this is only the beginning of a more fundamental change in the economy.

"This success story is really about a great economic transformation occurring in the global economy, with far-reaching implications for all of us," says Jeremy Rifkin”

"We're actually seeing the emergence of a new economic system alongside the traditional capitalist market, and the new system is a sharing economy."

Indeed while Airbnb valuation is supposedly superior to the Wyndham Worlwide and Hyatt Hotels ones, it never had to build a single hotel or employ professional hospitality personnel.

According to the the chief executive at hotel consulting firm Lodging Advisors in a Wall Street Journal interview, Airbnb provided accomodations to 416,000 guests that visited New York between July 2012 and July 2013 costing the industry around one million room nights.

This agreement shows once again what has been going on in every industry in the world, and mostly in the tourism field: partnerships to share resources, and overall create bigger corporation makes them more effective both on a local and a local market. This article is about two giants of the tourism world: Accor, the biggest Hotel Chain of Europe, and Amadeus, #1 GDS in the world. This partnership shows the full potential of company joining their forces together to benefit each other. This allowed Accor to open new hotels in other destinations, like Dubai, and the distribution system of Amadeus allowed Accor to enhance its own distribution system. The power of partnership here is awesome, and is said to be just a beginning: this is a turning point for the industry, which will greatly benefit from it, as well as other companies that shall follow the example of Accor & Amadeus and create partnership to combine their strengths and counter their weaknesses.

Article: http://www.amadeus.com/blog/25/03/accor-amadeus-celebrate-new-milestone-1-million-hotel-bookings-2013/