Meeting with Pierre-Yves Le Gal, founder of the place in Nantes.

Pierre-Yves Le Gal, hotel consultant and founder of Le Lieu-Dit in Nantes, took part in the interview game: “Hotels, a profession, a meeting”. Thanks to him for taking the time to share with us his experience and his vision of the world on our sector.

Pierre-Yves has been working for 2 years on the creation of a place to live in Nantes: Le Lieu-Dit

Hello Pierre-Yves, can you introduce yourself please?

My name is Pierre Yves Le Gal, I am 36 years old, I am the creator of a project which is called Le Lieu-Dit.

My career in the sector is quite linear, I first studied marketing at a business school in Nantes, then did a master's degree in hotel and restaurant management at Vatel and finally an MBA at Vatel Los Angeles specializing in catering.

I started working in the United States in Los Angeles for a group of restaurants called Patina and then in France at the Ciel de Paris restaurant at the top of the Montparnasse Tower where I had the chance to take over the management of the room quite young, barely 24 years old.

Then I went to work in Morocco in a hotel group. I was F&B director of a 5* establishment and then operational director of a smaller 5* establishment. I ended my career in this group by occupying the operations department. (hotels in Morocco, the Antilles, on the French Riviera and in the Alps).

For a number of reasons I decided to return to France with the idea of buying a hotel. I quickly confronted the market and I did not have enough experience No money to buy the hotel I was thinking of. Thanks to my previous experiences, I also realized that I had a very planned pace of work (hotel opening, reopening, recovery...)

It was then that I was offered another proposal: to reopen an establishment in the Antilles. I thus became a hotelier without a hotel and that is how Arzel was born.

For 10 years I have been supporting and co-managing projects to open hotels, create concepts, and monitor management. I worked in France and abroad on 15/20 projects that would push the cursors a little further on themes such as digital, sustainable, social or festive. The idea was to tell each other how to start with an existing building, land, or hotel and how We tell a story from an architectural point of view, design, customer journey, digital journey...

I accompanied all these projects alone in a very precise and tailor-made manner.

What is the project that has impressed you the most during your career?

One that took me the most time, the most energy, the most pleasure and at the same time the most frustration was the Yooma project in Paris. We are in 2015/2016, the project consists in creating a family inn with 106 rooms and 434 beds that combines design and originality 300 meters from the Eiffel Tower. It was a real challenge, I worked for over a year and a half on this project which impressed me a lot.

There was a real ambition to always look for a little extra edge, the uniqueness that will make the customer remember it. Here, many singularities were present: a facade signed by Burenne, an ora ito design, an urban vegetable farm on the roof, a robot for checking in, an artist residence...

All these idiosyncrasies were intended to get people talking about the project and the investor at the time understood that the quality of the rooms and the breakfast were not enough to stand out. Even if there are some fundamentals to respect, serving and welcoming people, it is all the other details that will allow a hotel to stand out from its competitors.

So it was a very heavy and very dense project, it is from this point of view that it impressed me the most.

Of course there were others, such as building a hotel in a soccer stadium in Le Havre, supporting the Grand Quartier in Paris, which was extremely well done, exploiting the Mandy project in Brazil, aimed at high-end customers with a real search for meaning.

All the projects I supported were exciting and each time I tried to come in with a new perspective.

Can you introduce us to Le Lieu-Dit, the project you have been working on for 2 years?

The Lieu-Dit is the result of a journey, I was a hotelier without a hotel and I needed a hotel. It was my wish, my desire, my ambition.

Initially, the Lieu-Dit, which was called Le Longchamps, was both a hotel and a neighborhood bistro. We have broken everything and for 2 years we have been working to create a village square that has its fundamentals and pillars: a wine store, a restaurant, an event space, 31 rooms and a desire to promote reuse (70% of decorative furniture equipment comes from reuse).

We have A desire to break the codes, to have an almost 4-5 star positioning on some sliders (bedding, wifi, shower) but a lot more minimalistic on equipment: no room service, no television in the rooms... The aim is to create sociability on the ground floor in a universe staged by frescoes on the outside and a very colorful space. We want to be in something happy, cheerful, and comforting.

The idea is also to go recreate local shops, to create contact, to be a laboratory for initiatives for new uses from an environmental point of view (consumption of water and welcome products, furniture, etc.).

During these 2 years of work did you continue to support other establishments?

I continue to support a project that is very dear to my heart in Les Sables d'Olonne. It is a creation of a 4-star hotel with standards other than the Lieu-Dit but nevertheless a desire to forge a link on 2 aspects:

• The central place of F&B: It is not the main driver of profitability but it is This allows the rooms to be filled and to create a place that will be “validated” by the locals.
• Reflection on the environmental impact

This is a project that I am co-managing during the launch of Lieu-Dit and which should open by 2024.

The hotel sector has experienced two difficult years and now seems to be regaining a certain dynamism. What do you think will be the main challenges for hoteliers in the coming months?

In my opinion, The main challenge for a hotelier is not to behave like a hotelier.

We must be able to create points of sale, proximity, we must be able to bring our neighboring and local customers back to our establishment.

In recent years this is the reason why Airbnb has done so much harm to hotels. We realized that there was no longer a big difference between someone who had a large, well-decorated apartment with a key box, nice photos and well distributed on Airbnb and a hotel that had emptied itself of its proximity and all of its services.

In my opinion, it is necessary to recreate this proximity and answer the question: How do I become a convenience store again and not just an establishment for people from out of town?

It is important to note that hotels with restaurants left the quickest during the covid period.

Another challenge, in my opinion, concerns the investments to be made in the hotel industry: to get out of the binary framework that we currently know with urban center products and periurban products. There is a real demand on neighborhoods in between, halfway between the city center and the outside where there is real neighborhood life and a very strong business pool. I think that we can get out of this dogma and thus allow young actors, and this is my case, to emerge. Going to the city center or peri-urban areas represents a real estate pressure that is such that we only see very large groups or groups from the real estate sector that can do it.

In my opinion, an individual project leader can look for alternative locations as long as It will create originality and where it goes (I don't like that term but it's very dear to you in tech) “disrupt” the market a bit.

To finish a slightly larger question: what do you think of digital technology in the sector? (for what uses: operations, customer relationships, or what could be the excesses?)

Digital technology is not a religion, it is a means.

In my opinion, it is an adaptation to the expectations and uses of customers and also based on a strong principle: There is no such thing as a 100% digital customer and a 100% non-digital customer.

Let me explain: if you have a hotel concept or product that requires a lot of contact with the customer, digital technology risks polluting it. When I say it's a tool, I mean it should allow you to save time, and it is this time that will have a high added value.

Digital technology does not mean robotizing our entire service, it's how I make it possible to facilitate time-consuming tasks that disrupt the service. For example, I am talking about self check in, to be able to order amenities or room service independently...

This is time that teams can devote to tasks with higher added value: if I save 10 minutes checking in, my customer may spend 10 minutes at the reception but we can tell him about the restaurants in the area, we can sell our services, our products, talk about the team and the approach.

Digital is very important but you should not get into the gimmick and say to yourself “I am going to digitize everything”. Whatever happens, there will always be a time when the machine will not have the answer and it will be the human who will have it.

It is also necessary to give the customer a choice. Depending on the context, mood, or desire, a customer's behavior can change. The same customer can have two different behaviors: for example, one evening during the week, a customer will want to order online via his application and the following week he will want to go to the local pizzeria to chat with the boss. They are not 2 different customers, it is one and the same customer who comes to the hotel in 2 different circumstances.

I think we need to get out of the paradigm “I have a young clientele I am digitizing, I have a slightly older clientele I do everything in person”. The “older” generations are also at ease with digital technology. Take the example of a 70-year-old person, digital technology arrived 20 years ago so this person has worked with it for many years. Maybe this person learned less quickly than a 25-year-old, but they are already comfortable using these tools.

To conclude on this subject, digital is important because it is the use. We use it to book a plane, a restaurant, access entertainment... But we will always see people, young or not so young, who prefer to go to Fnac printing a ticket to go to a concert.

You have to leave the choice, digital is a tool at the service of the customer and it is an additional channel.

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