Novotel is a Finalist for Best Upscale Hotel Brand at the
2026 Travelling for Business Awards, and it competes as the great all-rounder of international hotelkeeping. Since its founders opened the first roadside property outside Lille in 1967 — the seed from which the entire Accor empire grew — Novotel has perfected a deceptively difficult act: the hotel that serves the Monday consultant, the Thursday sales team and the Saturday family equally well, in hundreds of cities, without ever feeling confused about what it is.
The formula is balance, executed at scale. Rooms are calm, contemporary and genuinely consistent across continents; lobbies blend work, food and family life without friction; gyms, pools and all-day dining keep the travelling week humane. The brand has long been a quiet leader on family policy and on sustainability — from food-waste programmes to eliminating single-use plastics across the guest experience — commitments that increasingly decide corporate RFPs as much as rate does. Within Accor's vast constellation, Novotel is the dependable spine, wired into ALL, the group's loyalty programme, and priced in the sweet spot procurement teams defend easiest. Meeting rooms are a standard fixture rather than a big-city privilege — useful for the multi-city roadshow — and family-room inventory quietly doubles the brand's usefulness once school holidays arrive.
The brand also knows how to be famous. Its partnership with Paris Saint-Germain produced the
world's first permanent hotel room inside a football stadium — a suite overlooking the Parc des Princes pitch — followed by rooms celebrating the game's icons, a piece of brand theatre that says much about Novotel's confidence and its home-market swagger. More conventionally, Travelling for Business rated its
Tour Eiffel flagship beside the Seine a model of the brand's virtues: location, ease and value in one of Europe's most expensive cities. The estate keeps refreshing at pace, from new flagships in Istanbul's business districts to steady renovation across the European core.
The nomination recognises what six decades of refinement have produced — the upscale brand travellers stop thinking about because it simply works, everywhere, for everyone in the itinerary. Winners will be announced at the 2026 Travelling for Business Awards, and Novotel will host the morning after as smoothly as the night before.
