06/13/2025
As Europe’s biggest tech and innovation event, VivaTech provides the perfect stage for Accor to showcase how it is transforming hospitality through bold, practical innovation. This year, the Group spotlighted three startup collaborations at the Travel Tech Hub of VivaTech, each reflecting a broader commitment to innovation in the hospitality sector.
Innovation at Accor is a strategic mindset embedded across the business—essential for anticipating evolving guest expectations, addressing environmental and societal challenges, and accelerating progress on key priorities like decarbonization. Innovation at Accor is also an open mindset, collaborating with a range of industry players and stakeholders to collectively build solutions.
Through innovation, we aim to create new services and new businesses to accelerate key priorities for our group, such as decarbonization. The goal is to anticipate our guests’ expectations and evolving lifestyles, but also to be a key player in the future of hospitality.
Putting Accors’ vision of Hospitality Into Practice
For Accor, innovation is a shared priority across the entire organization—driving collaboration and progress at every level. To support this, the company’s Innovation Lab acts as a catalyst, helping teams collaborate, identify operational challenges, test new ideas and scale successful solutions.
This integrated approach supports Accor’s vision of hospitality looking beyond traditional hotel stays only to offer a broader range of services and experiences across the entire guest journey, from mobility and dining to wellbeing and entertainment. The goal is to both respond to today’s challenges and reimagine how hospitality can serve guests in more holistic and forward-thinking ways.
Collaboration plays a central role in bringing to life this approach. Accor works with startups to explore new ideas and gain agility, benefiting from their singular focus on building new businesses. This approach helps accelerate timelines and sharpen solutions. Innovation at Accor also extends beyond startups—partnerships include large groups and ecosystem players. These collaborations reflect a belief that the most impactful innovations are built together.
Three Startups Enhancing the Guest Journey
At VivaTech, Accor presented three startups—Alltheway, Fullsoon and Luniwave—each addressing a specific hospitality challenge.
Fullsoon began as an internal idea during the COVID-19 pandemic, when former Accor team member Hassan-Ali Chaudhary developed an AI solution to predict food demand and reduce waste in restaurants. Recognizing the potential, Accor supported him in developing the idea into a standalone business. Today, Fullsoon is a startup that enables hotels to better anticipate food needs, optimize inventory and lower their carbon footprint—all while improving margins and the guest experience.
Alltheway addresses a more logistical challenge: luggage. Developed in partnership with Air France and ADP (Aéroports de Paris) the service transports baggage between city centers and airports, allowing guests to move more freely. What began as a cross-industry collaboration has since evolved into a seamless, AI-enabled travel service backed by Accor. It’s a win for operational efficiency, guest satisfaction and sustainable travel.
Luniwave develops smart in-room technologies designed to reduce water and energy use without compromising guest comfort. Its flagship product, the LuniShower, reduces water consumption through timed flow cycles, while the GreenMiles program rewards guests for making sustainable choices during their stay. It’s a tangible example of how technology can drive efficiency with sustainability and better experiences.
To develop these services, Accor works closely with its startup partners at every stage, offering access to hotel environments for testing and iteration, as well as strategic support to bring concepts to market. Some projects even begin inside the Group through intrapreneurship, as was the case with Fullsoon, which was founded by a former Accor team member.
There are several ways to collaborate with startups. We give them access to our teams and our hotels to test their solutions and evaluate them when needed. We support some of them in creating or evolving their solutions. We also give them visibility and share our network—even beyond Accor.
Shaping Tomorrow’s Hospitality
Accor’s approach to innovation is focused not only on what’s next That means investing in artificial intelligence, circular practices and energy efficiency, while empowering teams and startups to test and iterate in real conditions. Innovation, for Accor, is as much about empathy as it is about performance. It starts by listening, understanding emerging guest needs and then creating solutions that drive long-term value.
From predictive AI tools to new sustainability initiatives, Accor is reshaping the guest experience and driving long-term value across its network. What sets it apart is not only the drive to innovate, but the ability to bring ideas to life at scale.
Image credit: Antoine Marceau
