Hospitality Operator Forum – Solenne Ojea Devys, CEO OKKO HOTELS et Johanna Wagner, Impact-first entrepreneur and sustainability expert from agence Hope, Join Educ, BTSP
The objective is to show us as hospitality professional, how to make the positive impact for the future.
If you want something to happen in 2030 it has to happen in 2025. – Johanna Wagner, Impact-first entrepreneur and sustainability expert from agence Hope, Join Educ, BTSP
I really like the idea of think about the future of the industry with the people who are already the future, the hospitality students. – Solenne Ojea Devys, CEO OKKO HOTELS
Student: We built long term collaborations with 8 organizations to inform people of food and waste.
Student: You need to rebuild the image that collective catering has.
The key in sustainability , if you are not an expert on that field,its good to be in touch with other specialists, that will help you. For example, we did a collaboration with the Social warehouse.
OKKO Hotels buy 2 farms between 2025 and 2030 to cater our guests.
All our hotels are in city-center so it a nice opportunity for our teams to be in contact with nature in our farms .- Solenne Ojea Devys, CEO OKKO HOTELS
Student: All hoteliers should feel responsible and do something to have a positive impact
CRS now and for real – Cyril Lanrezac, General manager Ecole de Savignac
We wanted to develop e-learning content, which we were able to put together with Johanna Wagner and Solenne Ojea Devys.
What cannot be measured cannot be improved.
It’s important to offer the means to go further in your CSR approach without resorting to greenwashing.
Our vision is holistic and very concrete, with working groups.
AI and CSR are the two areas that are completely beyond us at the moment.
The power of employer brand – Consuelo Corridori, Group Chief People & Talent Officer B&B HOTELS
An employer brand is how an organization present itself externally as an employer, to show their particularities, what makes them special and stand out.
There are 3 areas that are important. THE 1st one is reputation, the second element is the propositions and the 3rd element is experience.
The culture is central to the employer brand.
You need to have staff that are proud to work with you.
A strong employer brand can increase talent retention by 22%.
The brand is build around our values.
The 3c’s mean that you need culture community and career.
Younger generations, what do they expect ? – Sophie Donabedian, Chief Sustainability Officer B&B HOTELS
We launched a promotion of young, inclusive work-study students, in particular students from priority neighbourhoods. We trained them in our hotels.
We went to meet these students to listen to what they had to say.
They don’t know much about budget hotels.
The stories that exist today often focus on top-of-the-range hotels.
Budget hotels can offer exciting career prospects.
Students all dream of travelling and we need to think about how to address this need. How can we meet this need for new horizons? With 900 hotels, we can meet this need to get away from it all.
Hoteliers have told us that their main HR mission is not so much recruitment as retention. So we need to work on our employer brand.
They are looking to us to help them create this brand and pass it on to their staff.
Hoteliers are also looking for more mature profiles, including people who have undergone retraining.
We are launching a new promotion in collaboration with an association to help immigrants enter the hotel industry.
Hospitality industry : being attractive again – Sophie Donabedian ; Consuelo Corridori ; Cyril Lanzerac ; Cecile Rosset Piettri, Co-founder Brand & Development Korner Hotels ; Nicolas Dayot, President FNHPA
We listen to students and we genuinely want to involve them. They represent the future.
Action starts with making issues visible, so we can understand how to act afterwards.
The real driver behind a CSR transformation is ensuring people are engaged in concrete actions.
Korner Hotels: The idea was to give power back to operational teams through decentralized, horizontal management. This way, everyone has a real impact on the daily operations of our business.
It is important to give a voice to people in the field. Everyone should be able to identify what is not working and share it.
Today, we are recruiting easily, which is a very positive signal. Moreover, the quality of the profiles we are hiring is very interesting.
Technology is a way for us to manage our teams and hotels in a decentralized manner. It has allowed us to bring back meaningful human interactions in our establishments.
FNHPA: In our sector, it’s more down-to-earth, with major groups that resemble hotel groups, but in the rest of the family-run campsites, the profession has introduced tools like the industry employer brand.
We have developed a turnkey strategy to address our talent sourcing issues.
Some employers have spontaneously sensed that things have evolved with the younger generations and have adapted in order to recruit more effectively.
We need to change our approach to human resources management.
B&B: When we bring meaning to our work, we attract new types of profiles.
In our organization, we have a whole section dedicated to agents. It is not only about working with others, but also about understanding where others are coming from. It’s about the experiences you share.
“We have a one-year-long program. We ask people to spend one week in another department, to learn how it works. This can be either on the customer side or in the service departments. At the moment, it’s a bit difficult to gather feedback, because at some point the person wants to step back, and then not.
What hoteliers want is to retain people. Because if they train them, they want to keep them.”
