ACCORINVEST manually was taking two-and-a-half hours of our team members ' time ”. That particular job in some of the hotels is now being done by robots with no involvement of staff , which is complementary to human work , and we will be rolled out across the remaining portfolio . “ So at that time , around midnight , the team member could be doing something else or getting some sleep ,” in another example of IT and digital feeding into the company ’ s ESG strategy .
Asked if guests like the digital innovations they see , Lacz is very clear : “ Yes , but I think
it ' s not even that they like it , it ’ s gone beyond that , they demand it . Therefore , we need to meet this expectation . But at the same time , we can ' t just binary switch from a more analogue way of doing things to fully digital , because we still have different types of customers to cater for . It was natural that the digitalisation demands of the customer would increase during COVID-19 . And I think the area in which this is most visible is payment . People do not want to pay by cash anymore .
“ In some areas of the business I still believe we should work in parallel modes for a period , or we face losing customers who are not so comfortable with digital . For example , in some countries , there is no need for hotels to have analogue phones anymore . In France , we usually keep the