Less than a month after Marriott said it will buy Starwood Hotels for $12.2 billion, another big transaction has been announced that will shrink the number of major players in the global lodging industry even more. 

This time, the buyer is the French lodging giant AccorHotels, and the target is a trio of luxury hotel brands: Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel. The sellers include the Qatar Investment Authority, Kingdom Holding Company of Saudi Arabia, and Oxford Properties, an Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System company.

The acquisition is nowhere near the size of Marriott’s Starwood purchase — the three brands include just 155 hotels and resorts, 40 of them still under development, with a total of 56,000 rooms. But the individual properties include some of the world’s most prestigious luxury hotels, like The Plaza in New York, The Savoy in London, Le Royal Moncaeu-Raffles Paris, the Fairmont in San Francisco, Swissotel-The Stamford in Singapore and many more. The 155 hotels are spread across 34 countries, mostly in North America and Europe.

AccorHotels said it will pay $840 million in cash, and will issue 46.7 million new Accor shares, with the Qatar Investment Authority getting a 10.5 percent stake in Accor and the Saudi company picking up 5.8 percent.

One jilted suitor in the Marriott deal was InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), which was widely rumored earlier this year to be moving in on an acquisition of Starwood. And the same thing happened in this transaction: Just three months ago, financial media reported that IHG was on the verge of snapping up Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel for $2.9 billion. But the owners apparently preferred Acccor’s offer.

Accor said the acquisition will bolster its own operations thanks to the integration of a customer base that includes 3 million loyalty members, three-fourths of them North Americans. It said the deal will give it a total of 500 luxury and upscale locations worldwide, making it “one of the key global players in this segment.”

Accor has some 3,800 properties worldwide, with a number of brands covering all major market segments, including Sofitel, Pullman MGallery, Grand Mercure, Novotel, Mercure, Adagio, and Ibis.  It just passed the 500,000-room mark with the opening of a pair of new properties at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport — a Pullman and an Ibis Styles hotel.

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