FROM ONE-SHOT TRAINING TO LONG-TERM LEARNING PATHS

In many companies, training still means a one-off session: a few hours, a certificate, and then back to business as usual.
At Accor Academy, the ambition is very different. Instead of “one shot trainings”, the team is designing real learning paths that can last one, two or even three months. These longer journeys don’t happen all the time, but when they do, the results are striking: engagement is higher, retention is stronger, and satisfaction scores reach unusually high levels.
For Pascaline, training isn’t just about checking a box. It’s about creating a learning journey that engages, inspires, and retains employees. “We try to have not just one-shot trainings but real paths that last one, two, maybe three months,” she explains. The goal is clear: employees should feel that learning is an ongoing adventure, not a chore.

GAMIFIED HOSPITALITY TRAINING: SCORE, LEADERBOARD, CERTIFICATE

One of the most innovative examples of this approach is the SOP Game. The experience is structured into three chapters, with a clear progression and a very concrete reward system: score, leaderboard, and final certificate. Learners don’t just “consume” content. They play. They compete. They unlock.
There is even a secret room to discover, accessible only if you collect the right elements during the simulation training.

For the Accor Academy team, the dream was to create this sense of surprise, a “little gift” for employees. On the surface, it feels like a game. In reality, it is a powerful learning engine.

TURNING SOPS INTO AN ENGAGING LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Behind the game lies the seriousness: standard operating procedures (SOPs).

These SOPs are the backbone of hospitality operations. They explain how to welcome a guest, clean a room, prepare a dish, sort waste, or set up a bed correctly. Originally, these SOPs existed as dozens and dozens of PDF documents, full of text. They were essential, but hard to digest.

The Guest Experience teams created the core content. Accor Academy and Emraude then took that content and turned it into a gamified learning solution.

The goal: make SOPs more accessible, more concrete, and far more engaging for hotel staff.

A GLOBAL HOSPITALITY GROUP WITH 300,000 EMPLOYEES

To understand the scale of the challenge, you have to look at the group itself.

Accor is one of the world’s leading hospitality groups, operating in around 110 countries.
The group includes:
- 5,600 hotels
- 10,000 restaurants
- More than 45 brands, from economy to luxury and lifestyle
Altogether, that represents roughly 300,000 employees worldwide.

For more than 40 years, Accor Academy has been responsible for training and developing these employees.
The challenge is not just to train them once, but to keep them growing, learning and performing over time.

CORE CONTENT, SHARED VALUES AND THE “HEARTIST” CULTURE

Across such a large network, Accor needs a strong common foundation. This is where “core content” comes in. Every hotel has access to training on Accor’s policies, sustainability strategy, social impact pillars, and corporate culture.

Pasclaine explains that central element of this culture is the “Heartist” concept: a combination of “heart” and “artist”. “Heart” refers to doing things with care, empathy and service mindset. “Artist” refers to job expertise, craft and professional know-how.

This dual identity is reflected in the way Accor trains its people: not just on what to do, but on how to embody hospitality with both skill and heart.

BRAND-LED LEARNING: IBIS, NOVOTEL, PULLMAN AND MORE

While some content is common to every hotel, much of the training is now brand-specific.
Accor is organized as a brand-led company. That means each brand has its own identity, its own service codes, and its own style of guest experience. You don’t welcome and serve a guest the same way in an ibis as in a Pullman or a Novotel.
Service culture trainings relaunched in 2025 are designed precisely to reflect these differences.
Brand-specific training ensures that every employee understands not only the standards of Accor, but also the unique personality of the brand they work for.

ROLE-BASED TRAINING FOR EVERY FUNCTION IN THE HOTEL

Inside a hotel, there is no single type of job. There are front desk receptionists managing check-in and check-out. F&B teams running the kitchen, restaurant and bar. Housekeeping teams ensuring cleanliness and room quality. And many “invisible” roles too: HR, finance, management, and other back-office functions.

Each of these roles has different responsibilities and different training needs.

Accor Academy designs targeted learning experiences for each function, with the aim of growing skills and raising performance across the hotel as a whole.

WHY BLENDED LEARNING STILL MATTERS IN HOSPITALITY

Pascaline also highlights a major challenge in hospitality training being access to technology. Not everyone has a laptop. Not everyone can sit behind a screen for hours. This is why a purely digital approach would not work. Instead, Accor relies on blended learning: a mix of classroom experience and digital experience. This hybrid model respects the constraints of hotel jobs while still leveraging the power of digital learning and gamification. It also helps avoid boredom. Each session feels like a fresh experience, not “just another training room moment”.

TRAINING AT SCALE: CENTRAL DESIGN, LOCAL ADAPTATION

Running training in more than 110 countries also means dealing with languages, cultures and local realities. To handle this, Accor Academy is structured around one centralized team and several regional academies. The central team designs the core content. Regional academies act as local ambassadors.

They activate the trainings in their markets, adapt where needed, translate, and support hotels on the ground. They know the languages. They know the culture. They understand the realities of operations.

For Pascaline, it's a winning organization that makes it possible to scale without losing relevance.

WHAT IS AN SOP FOR HOUSEKEEPING IN PRACTICE?

In the podcast, a concrete example is given: SOPs for housekeeping.
These procedures can cover things like:
- How to clean the bathroom step by step
- What to do when amenities are empty: refill or replace
- How to sort and dispose of waste correctly
- Which linens and sheets to use, and how to make the bed properly

Every task is broken down into clear, detailed instructions. The SOP Game takes these instructions and turns them into interactive actions, puzzles and situations instead of static text.

TACKLING TURNOVER WITH DEVELOPMENT PATHS

One of the biggest challenges in hospitality is turnover. Sometimes, a new employee joins a hotel, starts working, and leaves after only a few weeks. This is costly, financially, operationally and emotionally. Accor’s response is to build real development paths that go far beyond onboarding.

From day one, new hires are placed into step-by-step learning journeys.

The first phase is onboarding (often one to three months). Then comes skill development to increase performance in the current role. Finally, a more career-focused phase prepares the next steps and unlocks potential.

This structured path gives employees perspective: they can see where they’re going and how they can grow.

POINTS, REWARDS AND THE ROLE OF GAMIFICATION

Points and rewards are not used in every training, but they are increasingly present in gamified experiences like the SOP Game. Historically, Accor relied mostly on knowledge assessments and quizzes. Learners completed a module, took a test, and received a certificate. With Emraude, the next step was to go further: adding scores, leaderboards and incentives to spark healthy competition. The result? Training doesn’t just feel like “learning”. It feels like achieving something, individually and as a team.

MEASURING IMPACT: FROM SATISFACTION TO BUSINESS KPIS

Any serious learning strategy needs to answer one question: does it work? At Accor, impact is measured on two levels.

First, learner-level KPIs: satisfaction, self-assessment, and sometimes manager co-assessment. Employees are asked how much knowledge they gained, and how much they have applied in terms of behaviour on the job.

Second, business KPIs: the indicators that the operations already track. These include:
- RPS (reputation score of the hotel)
- GSS (guest satisfaction score)
- Specific KPIs such as loyalty program conversion rates

The goal is not to create new, abstract metrics, but to link training to real-world outcomes that matter for the business.

12 HOURS OF TRAINING ACROSS ECONOMY, MIDSCALE AND LUXURY BRANDS

The SOP Game was rolled out across three hotel segments:
- Economy: ibis and ibis Styles
- Midscale: Novotel
- Premium / luxury: Pullman

The experience covers four main job families: housekeeping, reception, food & beverage, and a cross-functional “Essentials for All” module. In total, around 12 hours of training were designed, tailored to different brands, segments and roles, but anchored in the same core approach. Because these brands represent a huge portion of Accor’s workforce, the project’s potential impact is massive.

FROM PDFS TO AN INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE

On the content side, the challenge was huge: roughly 360 pages of PDF, each with multiple pages.
For each brand, there were around 240 documents, each two to three pages long. All of this had to be sorted, prioritized, and translated into a game format.
The first big milestone was content selection: choosing which SOPs would have the biggest impact on service quality and excellence.
Then came transformation: turning text-heavy documents into playable scenarios, interactive simulation and visual elements.
It was a long, meticulous process, but essential to make the game practical, concrete and relevant.

GAME DESIGN, VISUAL IDENTITY AND BRAND RECOGNITION

Once the content was selected, two design pillars came into play: game design and visual design.

- Game design involved writing the scenario, defining the challenges, inventing characters, and creating small scenes that bring SOPs to life.
- Visual design ensured that each brand was recognizable: colours, materials, logos, uniforms, and overall atmosphere.
- Marketing and brand teams were involved to protect and express each brand’s identity inside the game.

The objective was simple: when employees play, they should feel at home in their brand universe.

TESTING, TRANSLATING AND LAUNCHING ACROSS REGIONS

After design, the game was tested with operational teams in different countries. The goal was to check: is it easy to understand? Does it reflect reality? Is anything missing or too “French”? Feedback from the field led to multiple improvements. Then came translations to ensure that learners in key countries could experience the game in their local language. The launch itself was not a simple “push a button” moment.

Accor Academy coordinated with regional academies so that each region could choose the best launch timing based on local business cycles, seasons and holidays.
A complete communication kit : slide decks, videos, teasers, visuals, email templates, helped local teams create buzz around the launch.

SATISFACTION RESULTS: 87% GIVE 5 OUT OF 5

The numbers speak for themselves. At the end of the game, learners are asked to rate their experience and answer NPS-style questions. Overall, 87% of players gave the highest possible satisfaction score: 5 out of 5. This is far above what is typically seen across training initiatives, programs and courses. On more detailed questions as well, the average score stays above 4.5 out of 5. This combination of qualitative feedback and quantitative KPIs shows that the experience is not just innovative, it’s effective.

LEADERBOARDS, HEALTHY COMPETITION AND MULTI-LEVEL INCENTIVES

Retention and engagement are reinforced by smart gamification mechanics. Each activity gives points. A minimum success rate of 80% is required to earn the certificate. Every country has its own leaderboard, showing the best-performing hotels. General managers can access these dashboards and compare their hotel with others in the region or country. At a regional level, Accor can identify top-performing hotels and, in some cases, reward them, for instance through lucky draw campaigns like the one launched by Novotel. This three-level incentive structure (individual, hotel, region) keeps motivation high at every layer.

A PARTNERSHIP BUILT ON AGILITY AND CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

Behind the scenes, the collaboration between Accor and Emraude has been key. It was the first time Accor Academy worked on such an SOP-based gamified experience. There were challenges, surprises and adjustments along the way. What made the difference was agility: the ability to listen, adapt, and find solutions in terms of planning, technology and security. Both teams kept refining the process, especially at the beginning of projects — spending more time together on scripts, illustrations and early design decisions. This mindset of co-creation and shared ownership is one of the main reasons the project went so well.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: LEARNING FROM 360 PDFS AND REAL-LIFE FEEDBACK

One big lesson: never underestimate the volume and complexity of 360 SOP PDFs. There is a lot of content to understand, select and translate into meaningful game actions. This requires pedagogical engineering, time and close collaboration, especially at the start. On the other end of the process, weekly and daily reports provide live data: satisfaction scores, completion rates, and qualitative verbatim feedback. Whenever a negative comment appears, rare but valuable, both teams look at it, investigate root causes, and adjust. The message is clear: the project is not a one-off delivery. It’s an ongoing commitment to improving the experience.

LOOKING AHEAD: SCALING TO NEW BRANDS AND NEW WORLDS

With strong results and high satisfaction, the SOP Game is not a one-time experiment. It opens the door to future projects, new brands, and even new narrative universes. In the podcast, when asked to choose a future learning universe, Pascaline picks a futuristic city, a world where robots and AI don’t replace people, but help create better experiences for both planet and guests. Open-world formats, customizable avatars, AI-powered companions and performance-driven KPIs are all part of the vision. The next generation of hospitality training will be immersive, personalized and data-informed and Accor Academy is already building it.

CONCLUSION: WHEN HOSPITALITY TRAINING BECOMES A PLAYABLE JOURNEY

The SOP Game and the broader work of Accor Academy show a clear shift in hospitality training. Training is no longer just about pushing content. It’s about designing journeys. It’s about mixing brand identity, operational excellence, employee experience and smart gamification. It’s about measuring impact not only through quizzes, but through real business KPIs and guest satisfaction. Most of all, it’s about making people feel that working at Accor is not just a job, it’s a learning journey. And in that journey, the more they play, the more they grow.