- Accor launches the 15th edition of its TakeOff! Challenge, focusing on reinventing guest welcome and cleanliness for 2026.
- The competition highlights that 78% of travelers cite cleanliness as the primary factor in hotel selection.
- The challenge will have a global rollout with regional editions, starting with China on April 3rd and Brazil on April 30th.
- Laurent Choain, Accor’s General Director People Culture, describes the challenge as an immersion into an intense, human, and demanding world.
Accor is launching the fifteenth edition of its TakeOff! Challenge, the international student competition inviting the next generation to rethink a decisive moment of any stay: the first impression. For 2026, the theme focuses on two inseparable pillars of a memorable hospitality experience, welcome and cleanliness.
A student competition that has become an institution
Edition after edition, the TakeOff! Challenge has established itself as a must-attend event for students worldwide. More than a competition, it is a co-creation platform: Accor confronts fresh ideas with the realities of the field, while spotting tomorrow’s talent for the hospitality professions.
As Europe’s leading hotel group, present in more than a hundred countries with some forty brands from economy to luxury, Accor faces, like the whole sector, a challenge of recruiting and retaining talent. By speaking directly to students, the group builds a pool of ideas and profiles, while showcasing the diversity of its careers.
The 2026 theme: nailing the first impression
This year, participants must imagine a guest experience that creates a strong first impression built on impeccable welcome and cleanliness. The stakes are anything but trivial: 78% of travellers cite cleanliness as the number one criterion when choosing a hotel. Two fundamentals that thus become the playground for innovation.
Long confined to the backstage, cleanliness has become a front-line reassurance argument since the health crisis. Treating it as a genuine experience lever, rather than a mere operational constraint, is arguably the most stimulating angle offered to the candidates.
A global rollout with regional editions
The challenge unfolds market by market, with staggered launches: China from 3 April, Brazil on 30 April, Mexico in April, then Europe and North Africa (in French, English and Spanish) in mid-September. One global ambition, adapted to the specifics of each region.
“A challenge with yourself”
“The TakeOff! Challenge is first and foremost a challenge with yourself, an immersion in an intense, human and demanding world,” sums up Laurent Choain, General Director People & Culture at Accor. A way, too, of drawing young talent towards professions where attention to the guest makes all the difference.
What it says about the hospitality of tomorrow
The initiative confirms a deeper trend: even the giants of hospitality keep reinventing the guest experience, putting fundamentals such as cleanliness back at the heart of luxury. Read also: the new addresses reshaping French hospitality in 2026.
Apply: registrations are made on the official TakeOff! Challenge platform.
