B&B Hotels | Low-cost hotel chain

Hotel chain ramps up global growth with Google

The French hotel chain B&B was established in 1990 and soon expanded into other countries, such as Germany, where it was launched in 1998 and now has 79 hotels. The company relies on Google products to keep its internal processes and structures as lean and efficient as possible. “In terms of growth, the Gmail app and Google Drive have been particularly important,” says Stéphane Martin, Director of IT at B&B Hotels. “The ability to edit documents, define workflows and individually assign access rights is just incredibly helpful. It’s also significantly improved our collaboration with our colleagues abroad.” But these are not the only Google solutions delivering major benefits for the employees at B&B’s German headquarters. For a while now the company has also been using Chromebox for Meetings, which has enabled it to both save time and reduce travel expenditure. “We build 10 to 15 new hotels each year. At that rate, seamless communication and coordination is extremely important, and that’s exactly what Google delivers,” explains Martin. There are also less obvious benefits: “As a medium-sized company with limited human resources, we need solutions that basically run themselves. Thanks to Google, we’re now much more flexible and can once again concentrate more on our core business,” concludes Martin. The migration to Google Apps for Business was initiated by B&B Hotels’ French parent company and the project was completed several months ahead of schedule thanks to the excellent support provided by the integration experts at Cloud Pilot.

We build 10 to 15 new hotels each year. At that rate, seamless communication and coordination is extremely important, and that’s exactly what Google delivers.

Stéphane Martin, Director of IT, B&B Hotels