Gérard Pélisson, the co-founder of the Accor group, has died at 91

Reference of the hotel industry in France, the co-founder of the Accor group, world giant of the sector, Gérard Pélisson, died at the age of 91 “following a long illness”, announced Monday March 6 his family at Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“A graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Paris and MIT”, this business executive had co-founded Accor, “one of the world’s leading hotels”, with his partner Paul Dubrule and was also the co-founder of the institute Paul Bocuse with the eponymous starred chef, recalled the family.

The group and its teams “will pay tribute to him on a virtual wall collecting expressions of sympathy from around the world”, said in a press release Accor, of which Mr. Pélisson had left the management in 1997 to become “co-chairman of the supervisory board, alongside Paul Dubrule”.

Accor’s current CEO, Sébastien Bazin, praised Gérard Pélisson as “the very model of the entrepreneur” who, with Paul Dubrule, “reinvented the codes of the hotel industry to give it a new course in international influence”.

The importation of standardized hotels

An engineer by training, Gérard Pélisson had left IBM “to deploy the American model of the standardized hotel industry in France”, an “innovative approach which was to lay the foundations” of Accor, today the 6th largest hotel group in the world with 5,400 establishments under the Novotel, Ibis, Sofitel, Mercure and Pullman brands in 110 countries.

After an experience in the United States, he had met Paul Dubrule, like him an admirer of the American “success story” Holiday Inn, with standardized rooms on the outskirts of cities when, in France, the hotel business was not yet an industry. .

In 1967, the duo had opened near Lille, on a former beet field near the northern motorway, a first Novotel, then two others in two years, in Colmar and Marseille. In 1974, Bordeaux welcomed an Ibis, the embryo of the first network of budget hotels in France and then in Europe.

In the 1970s, the SIEH (Hotel Investment and Operating Company) had invested in Africa, the Middle East, South and North America, before becoming Accor in 1983. Through takeovers -Courtepaille, Mercure, Sofitel…- the duo had broken the codes, innovated, inventing “the 99-franc room” for Formula 1 cars, and rising to the ranks of the world leaders in the sector.