[#PAFh19] ”For us, the main point is to have F&B clients and local people”

Romain Yzerman (RY): I manage the company with a rather important real estate point of view. Over the last 6 years, we have made almost 1 billion euros of real estate transactions in Paris, mainly in the office and retail sectors. In 2013-2014, we asked ourselves, like many others on the market, whether we should be interested in the hotel industry or not. We started to have this interest in the middle of the hotel crisis with the arrival of Airbnb followed by the terrorist attacks. This led us to a real subject of funding, based on the idea of reinventing the way of thinking in the hotel industry, which has completely changed - we have seen it in recent years. The particularity of our position with Emmanuel is the combination of real estate expertise, in terms of investment, sourcing, and cost price to enable us to do different things, as well as Emmanuel's long-standing expertise in hotel operations to try to bring other experiences to life. The idea was originally to try to develop a small hotel group that would be different from the mass of what we can see, and above all to find position, offer and service resources so as not to be in competition with Airbnb. The positioning was clearly to focus on the four and five star and the luxury hotel market. As a large private investor, this market is quite difficult for us to access, as well as a market with relatively little competition, since it requires a lot of resources. This is why real estate expertise is important for buying assets at a relatively low cost, in order to be able to have more resources to invest in CAPEX. The particularity of our position is to be mainly, if not exclusively, in premium and upgrade...