Accor Hotels – New Ibis Rooms

Further to my post about the new Ibis rooms…..

I’ve been looking into this a bit today, such is the joys of train travel and spare time. So, Ibis have launched some new hotels with their concept, the one I think is dated and won’t meet the needs of younger guests and business guests. The new social hub thing is brilliant, on trend, although they probably need to speed up the roll-out of coffee shops or craft beer elements to the ground floor, to bring in more non customers. Their desire to get people into their social spaces, both guests and visitors, is ahead of the curve.

But, back to the rooms. The real danger with commenting is that any individual only ever does so from their own perspective, so without the big data that the company themselves have. Sometimes the company know a change will be unpopular, but they can see that it’s working on a wider basis, so it’s worth persisting with.

Ibis have already rolled out their new room to a few hotels, so there are some numbers which we can see already.

This is their new flagship, the Ibis Tallinn Center, with the new room design since the outset. And, that figure isn’t looking good. What Ibis called their most modern and innovative room, in a sparkling new hotel with everything shiny and contemporary, is scoring a 3.4 out of 5. That’s low, very low, it’s about the same as the reviews for their cheapest of brands, Ibis Budget. The raw figure is also worse than it looks, as some guests really like the new room design, so they’re going to mark that higher than they normally would, so there must be some very negative opinions amongst the other reviewers. I found 26 negative reviews about the lack of desk, none of which the hotel addressed directly.

If we look at two hotels I’ve stayed in over the last couple of weeks, with the old Ibis design, they’re scoring at 4.0 out of 5 and 3.7 out of 5. Taking into account that these rooms are older, these should be scoring a fair bit under their flagship hotels.

The problem is that Accor’s press team hasn’t mentioned on-line their new room design since mid-2019, after a huge burst of publicity. They have though mentioned quite a lot about their new Greet concept, which has rooms which are modern, contemporary and quirky. I have no idea why they haven’t run with the Greet room design for their Ibis hotels, or the Ibis Styles concept.

This is a Greet hotel which opened at around the same time the Ibis in Tallinn opened, with their room score 4.1.

Based on this, I’m going to have a guess here that the Ibis rollout of rooms is amended in 2020, to bring the rooms back to some form of comfort and modernity…..