B&B Hotels Group has appointed Benjamin Lacroix as Chief Executive Officer of its United States entity, elevating a seasoned internal leader whose career has tracked the group’s own international ambitions across two continents.
Lacroix joined B&B Hotels in April 2019 as part of the Group Finance team at the company’s Paris headquarters, where he served in roles spanning financial planning and analysis and internal audit and control. In January 2023, he relocated to São Paulo to take on the position of Chief Financial Officer for the group’s Brazilian entity – a posting that placed him at the centre of a demanding operational restructuring. His remit expanded further in March 2025, when he was appointed CFO Americas, assuming dual responsibility for both Brazil and the United States. The step up to CEO of the US entity follows naturally from that broadened mandate.
Before entering the hospitality sector, Lacroix spent five years at Deloitte, progressing from Senior Auditor on the middle-market segment to Manager – a period that gave him a rigorous grounding in financial audit and corporate governance that has since underpinned his ascent through B&B Hotels’ finance function.
His academic profile reflects an equally international orientation. Lacroix holds a Master in Audit and Accounting from PSB Paris School of Business and a Bachelor in Marketing from BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. In 2025, he completed an INSEAD certificate focused on growth through innovation and technology – a signal that his leadership ambitions extend beyond financial stewardship into broader strategic territory. Fluent in French, English and Portuguese, and shaped in part by his early education at the Lycée Français de New York, he is well positioned to navigate the cultural and commercial complexities of the North American market.
B&B Hotels Group, founded in Brest, France, today operates 887 hotels across 17 countries. Its portfolio has doubled in size since 2019, and the group has set an ambitious target of reaching 3,000 properties globally within the next decade. That growth strategy has increasingly turned its attention westward. The company opened its first US property – a 218-room hotel near Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida – in 2024, and has since added locations in Miami and Jacksonville. A first greenfield development in the United States, a 40-room property, is also in the pipeline, underscoring the group’s intent to establish a durable and growing North American footprint.
The appointment is framed by B&B Hotels Group as a deliberate choice rooted in continuity. By entrusting the US operation to a leader who has been embedded in the group’s finance and development functions for six years, the company signals that its American growth phase will be driven by executives who understand its operational DNA from the inside. Group CEO Céline Vercollier, herself promoted from the CFO role earlier in 2025 as part of a broader governance evolution, oversees the strategic direction within which Lacroix’s appointment sits.
For Lacroix, the move represents the consolidation of a career that has moved in step with B&B Hotels’ own international expansion – from Paris to São Paulo to the Americas, and now to the chief executive seat of a market the group regards as central to its next decade of growth.
