Would You Like a SPAC With Your Hotel Home?

If a hotelier strikes you as an unlikely sponsor for a distinctive-reason acquisition company, you don’t know

Accor.

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The French company, whose chains incorporate Fairmont and Sofitel, stated Thursday that it wanted to start a SPAC on the Paris inventory exchange. The shell corporation would be worth about €300 million ($366 million) and scout for targets targeted on meals and drink, versatile doing work and activities, among the other sectors.

SPACs are typically linked with American company tycoons. As a firm, and a European one, Accor would be an unconventional sponsor. It is also late to the get together: Hunger for SPACs in the U.S. has collapsed in the latest months.

Still the move is not out of character. Accor has attained a standing as the lodge industry’s most enthusiastic corporate consumer in latest several years. French newspaper Le Figaro documented previous August that Accor was even researching a bid for

Intercontinental Accommodations,

operator of Holiday Inn—a go that would eventually give the French firm the massive U.S. business it craves.

Accor’s “augmented hospitality” technique entails attracting all method of enterprise to its resorts, from good dining to workspace furnishing. The SPAC could convey it a new client at very little value and most probable a financial gain. Sponsoring the automobiles has been a rewarding business enterprise, controversially so.

Also, it may possibly be more exciting for a European resort organization to assume about promotions than the grinding post-pandemic recovery.

Non-public businesses are flooding to distinctive-objective acquisition corporations, or SPACs, to bypass the standard IPO course of action and get a general public listing. WSJ describes why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check businesses is not well worth the possibility. Illustration: Zoë Soriano/WSJ

Publish to Stephen Wilmot at [email protected]

Appeared in the May 22, 2021, print edition as ‘OVERHEARD.’