Accor operates over 260 hotels across the UK under brands spanning budget to luxury. The four properties in this case study — Novotel Canary Wharf, Novotel Tower Bridge, Novotel ExCêL, and Ibis ExCêL Docklands — occupy London’s eastern business and events corridor: a cluster shaped by corporate travel, conference demand, and guests passing through one of Europe’s busiest convention venues.
These hotels attract business travellers on tight schedules, conference delegates managing full event days, and leisure guests exploring the city on foot. What every guest has in common is a phone that’s working hard from the moment they arrive and increasingly low on battery by the time they need it most.
The problem each property faced was structural, not incidental. Modern guests depend on their phones for navigation, contactless payment, room access, corporate calls, and everything in between. When that phone reaches critical battery, they look to the hotel for an answer. The available answers — a wall socket in the lobby corner, a cable borrowed from the front desk — tether the guest to one spot and consume front desk time on a request the team cannot formally resolve. Neither response reflects the experience a Novotel or Ibis property is positioned to deliver.
The frustration rarely surfaces in person. It shows up later: in the post-stay review that describes an otherwise good experience, in the corporate travel debrief where a competitor property is noted for doing it better, in the loyalty that quietly goes elsewhere. For a cluster of properties competing on guest experience in one of the world’s most competitive hotel markets, that gap — visible in every guest interaction, unresolved by every existing alternative — was the problem that needed a proper answer.
Joos was deployed across all four properties in London’s eastern corridor. Each property runs pay-per-use: guests register a card as a security deposit, collect a power bank, and go about their stay. If the power bank is returned, nothing is charged. The experience is frictionless for the guest and invisible for the team — no queries routed to the front desk, no reconciliation required by finance, no maintenance calls for the property to field.
Every property followed the same three-stage onboarding process:
Joos operates as a completely self-contained managed service across all four sites. Remote monitoring runs 24⁄7. Power banks circulate automatically. Every guest query is resolved through in-station prompts and the Joos app. The Canary Wharf installation has run without any operational input from hotel staff since October 2022 — a standard that has held, unbroken, for over three years.
Guest rentals across 4 properties
Genuine, recurring demand
Year-on-year growth, Tower Bridge
Year two outperforming year one
Revenue-to-energy-cost ratio
Net contributor from day one
For the GM: this is a demand signal, not a novelty figure. Across four properties and three calendar years, guests have consistently found and returned to the service — building it into their routine at the hotel. Novotel Canary Wharf has processed close to 500 rentals every year since 2022. That kind of repeat behaviour is what separates an amenity that’s merely available from one that becomes part of how guests experience the property.
For the guest experience lead: this is the maturation signal. Tower Bridge grew from 224 rentals in 2024 to 291 in 2025 — following the same upward curve Canary Wharf traced in its early years. The pattern is repeatable. A new Joos deployment doesn’t plateau; it compounds as guests discover and adopt the service.
For the finance or operations lead: this is the number that removes the conversation entirely. A single Joos device draws between 0.1 and 0.2 kWh per day — roughly the same as leaving an LED bulb on overnight. Across all four London devices, the total annual energy cost is under £65. Against that, with the annual revenue share the service is a net revenue contributor from day one, with no capital outlay and no cost of management.
