Interview with Valérie Hoffenberg, founder of the SHe Travel Club. Two years, a label and a training course later, the SHe Travel Club is inviting the hotel industry to celebrate hotels that welcome their women guests with dedicated services.
How did SHe Travel Club start?
SHe Travel was created 2 years ago, on the basis of a study we carried out with Marie-Claire magazine on 5,000 women to try and understand what women travellers really wanted.
We realised that 64% of all travellers today are women. So there was a real feminisation of travel and 80% of booking decisions were made by women, which meant that hotels now needed to make a paradigm shift to meet this demand from women. Indeed, 9 out of 10 women felt that they had specific needs as women when travelling, which were not sufficiently taken into account by the hotel industry.
The label has a dual purpose. To help hotels identify and understand what women really want, so that they can offer a personalised customer experience. Secondly, to help women, but also travel managers, to identify the hotels that have made the effort to adapt their offers so that they can be chosen and prioritised when booking.
For us, it's a question of opening the eyes of this sector to the feminisation of travel, as well as to gender equality. It's a sector that can still make progress on this issue, even though the majority of its customers are women and many women work in the hotel industry.
How many hotels are currently involved in this certification process?
After 2 years, we will soon have 500 hotels. In the first year, we deployed a large number of pilots with major brands because we were a new label, and we had to show what we could offer, our added value.
We are very pleased that the renewal rate for year 2 is just over 80%. And above all, the major chains, which started out with pilot projects of 5 or 10 hotels to test things out, are now rolling out on a large scale. We started with Accor, who were the first to believe in us. We have just been listed with Accor.
This proves the importance and interest of this label for the hotel chain. The same goes for the Golden Tulip chain, where today we will be signing this partnership. This partnership has had two impacts. The first is that we are improving the customer experience. Rose Bakry, who is the Director of Africa, also told us that she felt it had a very significant impact on the atmosphere in the hotels and on the employer brand. This has enabled her to attract female talent to her hotels, but also to create an environment in which everyone, men and women alike, can flourish.
We are now present in over 40 countries and have also signed partnerships with major chains such as IHG. They had launched a test in Italy and now want to roll out the label in nearly 150 hotels under 2 brands to promote their CSR commitment.
It's also an asset for the employer brand and for creating an inclusive environment in these hotels. We are also communicating about the CSR commitments of hotels and major brands, since numerous surveys now show that women are taking into account the CSR commitments of their favourite brands before they make a purchase. This is also a trend in the hotel industry, where CSR is not just about the environment, but also about inclusion.
On the employer side, there is a training module
We began last year by creating the Best Hotels for Women award, where we really broke new ground. It's the only award that rewards hotels on the basis of 2 criteria: criteria for improving the travel experience for female guests, but also for implementing internal equality measures such as equal pay and protecting employees' quality of life.
We are very pleased to see that for this 2nd edition, most of the hotels that were among the best in terms of customer experience wanted to take part and answer this second questionnaire.
The idea was really to create a chain of solidarity between customers and employees. Because we think that when employees are treated well, it also has an impact on customers.
The idea was to create training and E-modules to raise awareness among general managers and staff about sexism and how to avoid or respond to situations of harassment. This module covers relations between employees, between customers and employees, and between customers. All the examples come from first-hand accounts, so we're getting down to the real thing. We explain very concretely how to respond to all these situations. For a guest, the experience in a hotel also depends on the way she is treated by the staff. It's this aspect that we now want to improve with this e-module.
What are your objectives for 2024?
To double our number of partner hotels. To reach 1,000 hotels, with hotels in all categories. Why do we want to do this? The SHe Travel Club (Safe and Happy everywhere) is our promise to all women. We believe that women who also travel for business don't always go to 5-star hotels. They also often go to 3-star hotels. We absolutely want all women, when they travel, wherever they go, to at least be able to find safety criteria and a minimum of comfort.
For too long, business travel has been the forgotten area of gender equality policies in major companies. But this is about to change, as the safety of employees during business trips is becoming a real compliance issue.
That's why we set up a partnership with CDS Groupe last year, so that the SHe label is now visible on the CDS booking tool. We are also starting up a partnership with H Corpo.
On 6 March we will be presenting the Best Hotels for Women award for the second time. This award is based on questionnaires for customers and questionnaires for employees.
