More than four decades at Accor
Evelyne Chabrot passed away on Saturday 8 August 2026. According to her professional biography published by United Coaching, the firm she founded after leaving Accor, she had joined the group in 1974 and spent more than 42 years there, including around twenty years in operational roles before continuing her career in human resources.
This longevity gives a sense of the scale of the transformations she took part in. Over these decades, Accor grew in scale to become one of the world’s leading hotel groups. During the period corresponding to her human resources responsibilities, the group’s workforce grew from around 45,000 to 180,000 employees.
From Africa to international hospitality
In an account given in November 2021 to the Curiosity Club, at an event held at Wojo Paris 13 BnF, Evelyne Chabrot described developing a taste for adaptability early on, following her family of hospitality professionals across several African countries.
She described herself there as a “citizen of the world” and recalled a career built as a succession of steps climbed with tenacity, in a hotel industry where leadership roles were then still very largely held by men, often from academic backgrounds she did not necessarily share.
At the heart of Accor’s transformations
When Accor announced, on 2 April 2015, the appointment of Arantxa Balson to succeed her as the group’s Head of Human Resources, Evelyne Chabrot was still guiding the company through a period of deep transformation, notably under way since Sébastien Bazin became Chairman.
She then oversaw the transition with her successor to ensure, in Accor’s words, a smooth handover of leadership. On that occasion, Sébastien Bazin highlighted the role Evelyne Chabrot played in supporting the group’s transformation and praised “her commitment, her integrity, her kindness and her devotion” to Accor.
Those few words also sum up an approach to human resources that ran through her career: supporting company transformations without separating them from the people who make them possible.
A second life devoted to coaching
After leaving Accor, Evelyne Chabrot chose to pursue this connection with others in a different way. Having become a professional coach, she founded United Coaching, focusing notably on the links between professional expectations, individuals’ personal needs and organisations’ performance requirements.
This career shift ultimately extended a thread already present throughout her career. Having spent several decades supporting the transformation of a company that had become global, she chose to devote this new stage of her professional life to the transformation of individuals.
Beyond its longevity, Evelyne Chabrot’s career also tells the story of an era in hospitality — that of an Accor group she joined in 1974 and which she saw change in scale, business lines, geography and governance, while accompanying the evolving role of human resources within the company.
Her path also shows that one need not be confined to a single role, however important. After more than four decades within the same group, Evelyne Chabrot chose to continue, in a different way, what appears to have been one of the threads running through her career: supporting people through their own transformations.
With her passing, one of the leaders of the generation that helped build modern French hospitality is gone — a leader who went on to pass down that experience well beyond the company that had shaped most of her professional life.
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