Rouen hoteliers relaunch a club to make themselves better heard by communities

The hoteliers of Rouen (Seine-Maritime) have just decided to breathe new life into what had been nothing more than an empty shell for several years: the Rouen-Vallée de Seine hotel club. “It is a structure that existed before gradually ceasing its activity six or seven years ago. It was dormant, so to speak,” recalls Vincent Mesureux, its former president, who has decided to return to service with the new team, but this time in the role of vice-president, leaving the head of the association to Nicolas Cimetière, the director of the Mercure-Cathédrale hotel. A revival linked in part to the arrival of new major players in the area with the most recent opening of the Hyatt Place on the heights of the city or the establishment of an Adagio and a Novotel in the former Palais des Consuls.

A general meeting was held on Monday, September 9, 2024 to dust off the club’s statutes and a next meeting is already scheduled before the end of the month. To date, 25 professionals have already joined, or a third of the establishments in the Rouen metropolitan area, which has 75 for a total of almost 3,400 rooms, according to the latest figures from Rouen Tourism. “That’s almost twice as many as in the first version of the club. It’s very encouraging,” emphasizes Vincent Mesureux, director of the Holiday Inn Express Rouen-Centre.

Joint exhibitions and operations

For him, “it’s a way of taking our destiny back into our own hands and not expecting everything from the tourist office and local authorities.” It’s also a way of making ourselves heard in matters not only related to tourism: “We can think about waste management, the direction of traffic in the city or the signage that concerns us. We sometimes had the impression that we weren’t always heard or even consulted. The club will allow us to be clearly identified as a representative interlocutor for our sector of activity.”

In the future, the experienced professional also hopes that the club’s members will be able to attend trade fairs – they will at least be at the Rouen exhibition center for the 2024 edition of Rest’Hôtel – and conventions, organize operations to promote local products to their customers or even have a charitable component. He also hopes to invite speakers to shed light on different aspects of their activity. “For example, we can imagine receiving someone from France Travail to discuss recruitment assistance. Sometimes there are systems that concern us that we are not even aware of.”