WATCH: Accor’s Philip Jones on winning GB Company of the Year

Hospitality company Accor won big at this year’s Gulf Business 2023 Awards, with it walking away with two awards.

The first was the Hospitality Company of the Year Award, and the second was the Company of the Year Award.

Philip Jones — Accor Group’s Senior Vice President Operations, Middle East & Africa — spoke to Gulf Business on the sidelines of the awards, and explained how a renewed focus at the group has helped make a major difference to its performance over the last year.

READ MORE: Winners of the Gulf Business Awards 2023

“It was a great honour to win Hospitality Company of the Year and now to win the Company of the Year Award is a huge honour. I feel very happy and very proud on behalf of all 30,000 ladies and gentlemen across the region, because this is their award, this is not it’s not my award,” Jones told Gulf Business.

“We went through this very bold and brave move to restructure our business at a time when just doing the same thing would have garnered great success, but I think the focus that we’ve put into our business today has really paid dividends,” Jones added.

Among the key successes for Accor this year has been a deal that it inked to bring 18 new hotels to Saudi Arabia by 2032.

According to real estate consultancy firm, Knight Frank, Accor is the top hospitality player in Dubai with 71,820 existing rooms and another 49,510 more in the pipeline expected for completion by 2030.