BERLIN — Covivio Hotels is on a mission to grow, and it is looking to use its available capital to spend on assets and burgeoning operating platform to do just that.
Speaking with CoStar News Hotels at the 2026 International Hospitality Investment Forum EMEA, CEO Tugdual Millet said Covivio Hotels currently has €300 million ($353.5 million) earmarked for hotel acquisitions with another €1 billion for repositioning existing assets. He pointed to the company's capacity to repurpose underperforming offices into hotels as a strength.
Office-to-hotel conversions are "getting traction," he said. "I would say there are different questions around, obviously the value of the property, the existing value, the capacity that you have to transform, and also the discussion that you need to have with the city, which makes those different steps quite long in terms of process. But as soon as you have done a few, you are getting a lot of experience. And I have to say that so far, specifically with the three projects that we have in Paris, we are in this position to be quite experts in this repositioning story."
Covivio Hotels is the hotels division of French real estate investment trust Covivio, which has nearly €24 billion in assets with a focus on hotels, offices and residential real estate.
Another key driver of growth for the company is its hotel management platform, WiZiU, which Deputy CEO Sébastien de Courtivron said currently manages 24 Covivio hotels with plans to add more.
Elevating on-property operations is one of the key ways of increasing overall value and performance for Covivio Hotels' portfolio, de Courtivron said.
"Things are moving positively," he said. "We're very happy with the results .. and if we're looking into the future, capturing this value creation will help us also increase the portfolio and the platform."
For now, the plan is to grow the WiZiU platform within France and Belgium, with an objective to double the portfolio size within five years, but continue to work with third-party operators in other parts of Europe, particularly the U.K. and Germany, de Courtivron said.
Growing Covivio Hotels' portfolio in Southern Europe is a key focus for company, as highlighted by the company's recent €217 million acquisition of four properties in Milan through a partnership with Invest Hospitality. Millet said Covivio Hotels will be looking "from Portugal up to Greece."
"Because we try to build a portfolio that is, at the end, as resilient as possible, we want to be much more balanced between Northern Europe and Southern Europe," he said. "Currently Southern Europe is around 20% of our portfolio. We want to increase up to 33%, having one third in Southern Europe and one third in Northern Europe because we still believe that there are places that will benefit from the evolution of tourism. Then the core of the portfolio is obviously France."
Watch the video above or listen to the podcast version for more from Covivio Hotels' Tugdual Millet and Sébastien de Courtivron.