Another part of any acquisition raises questions about loyalty programmes, which is always an interesting topic of discussion. Prior to the acquisition, FRHI ran ‘guest recognition programmes’ under the headlines of Fairmont President’s Club, Raffles Ambassadors, and Swissôtel Circle, while AccorHotels has the Le Club AccorHotels programme. Will these merge or stay the same? Bazin responds quickly that these will not stay the same, rather, they will be merged to help guests across all brands benefit from shared advantages. “But it’s going to be done about 18 months into transition because they have a different programme. That means we have to link all the IT systems — which is doable but it takes a bit of time. If anything, our loyalty programme is today 33 million clients and they have 3.5 million. They bring to me a lot of US-based loyalty programme holders where we have very minimum so they bring me sizeable portion of the United States. But there again it’s win-win,” he explains.