Accor gains almost 100% efficiency improvements through upgrading its global marketing team to Asana

Highlights

Challenge

Accor's marketing teams were confronted by scattered information and multiple layers of communication. Critical data was spread across tools like Excel and PowerPoint, making collaboration difficult. Frequent meetings and email exchanges consumed valuable time, and teams felt disconnected across different regions and time zones.

Solution

Asana became Accor's central platform for marketing coordination. The company integrated 200 external collaborators, including agencies and consultants, into a single system and provided personalized training to ensure smooth adoption.

Outcome

The new approach transformed Accor's marketing workflow. By centralizing communication, the company achieved:

• 96% improvement in team efficiency

• 50% reduction in meetings and emails

• More time for creative and strategic work

The streamlined system connected global teams, simplified project management, and enabled marketers to focus on what they do best: creating compelling campaigns.

With Asana, we created a single source of truth, facilitating communication between local and global teams and this allowed us to plan and organize campaigns without negatively impacting workloads.”

Accor selects Asana to streamline and centralize marketing campaigns

Marketers highlight simplified workflow and increased transparency.

Marketing teams often struggle with communication chaos: endless email threads, back-to-back meetings, scattered Excel files, and multiple "final" versions of PowerPoint presentations.

Accor, a leading global hotel industry firm, faced this challenge with nearly 700 employees and contractors working across a multitude of brands in four global regions and hundreds of marketing campaigns a year.

Campaign director Juliette Dembele recognized the company's fundamental problem: unstructured processes that created poor visibility and wasted significant time and resources.

Accor sought a proven solution to streamline workflow, improve cross-team collaboration, reduce email and meeting volume, and create a single source of truth for marketing campaign information, agency spending, and program management. The goal was to enable real-time visibility across regions, time zones, and languages.

Accor first introduced Asana in January 2023, inspired by its ability to centralize information and processes, its simplicity "even by non-technical teams", its adaptability, and its powerful real-time collaboration capabilities. 

Deploying Asana also opened the door to the possibility of integrating external agencies and consultants — a major bonus capability that sealed the deal for Accor.

Amani Salma, the cross-channel campaign manager for the Europe and North Africa region at Accor, says: "Asana made it possible to integrate nearly 200 external partners, agencies and consultants into our ecosystem and to facilitate their collaboration with our internal teams. Asana means it is finally possible to coordinate campaigns and effectively manage workflows on a large scale."

Asana: Smooth deployment and user adoption exceeding expectations

Easing the transition with structured training and progressive adoption.

Accor introduced Asana through a structured rollout supported by iDO, an expert integrator. To maximize adoption, the company created an intuitive, customized interface anyone could use and ran personalized training workshops adapted to the specific needs of team members in departments such as Marketing, CRM, Communications, and E-Commerce.

This ensured internal adoption of the tool and put successful implementation on the fast track. The initial phase onboarded 300 pilot users. Initial success led to rapid rollout. Today, Asana is a critical workflow tool used daily by more than 500 employees and 200 external partners such as agencies and consultants.

The initial training was so successful that hundreds of employees asked to be onboarded on Asana.”

Personalized workshops and training made it possible to onboard all the teams, whether they worked in CRM, SEO or media.”

Accor taps Asana to harmonize collaboration and align global marketing teams

Ensuring all teams speak a common language.

Asana enabled Accor to standardize workflows and tools and harmonize working methods between local and global teams. This has facilitated adoption, enabled consistent management of campaigns and projects, and simplified the addition of new users. 

"Now, with Asana, we have harmonized workflows between our different regions, which was a real challenge," says Marie Patrigeon, Director of Events & Strategic Communication Projects at Accor. "This simplified campaign management by making the whole process much smoother." 

Asana features such as “multi-homing" ensures that tasks once siloed in tools like Excel are now fully visible, tracked and updated across multiple projects and teams simultaneously, avoiding duplication and promoting collaboration.

As Patrigeon explains: "Multi-homing allows us to create a single task that multiple teams can use, making work more collaborative and less redundant. Combining this with Asana's comment sections, information previously scattered across multiple tools is now accessible to everyone in one place and in real time."

• All commercial activations and major campaigns are managed consistently, locally and globally.

• Asana's features simplify collaboration and centralize information for real-time access.

Asana has united many employees on tasks and projects with shared guidelines. Managing many campaigns and getting so many people to collaborate would be impossible without Asana.”

Asana delivers increased transparency resulting in tangible benefits for Accor’s global marketing organization

Centralization and alignment of teams is a snap with Asana.

Since adopting Asana, Accor's global marketing team has coordinated and completed over 300 campaigns on the platform. Teams have embraced the tool enthusiastically, reporting that it has transformed their work methods and centralized campaign information, particularly for reviews and approvals.

The shift eliminated the need for multiple exchanges to locate data or find the right contacts. Now, all team members can instantly access campaign status, responsibilities, and deadlines.

"With Asana, we created a single source of truth, facilitating communication between local and global teams and allowing us to plan and organize our work without negatively impacting the teams' workload," explains Dembele.

"We no longer waste time looking for information; everything is accessible in real-time," adds Patrigeon.

The platform has delivered two key benefits: eliminating information silos through centralization and improving campaign visibility through better team coordination.

We have increased efficiency by 96% and reduced emails and meetings by half.”

What’s next for Accor marketing?

The future looks promising. At the forefront of this vision is the upcoming integration of artificial intelligence for even more efficiency. 

"The addition of Asana AI will allow us to generate detailed reports and summaries of all our tasks, projects and portfolios," says Dembele.

Patrigeon adds, "Even if I discover a new feature in the tool every day, AI will open a new world for working better and more efficiently."

And all of this will help support the most important outcome of all: helping Accor’s customers enjoy incredible stays and restful nights.

"Asana is more than a service provider,” says Dembele. “It is a true partner."