Ziad Minkara and
the business of
getting there

Two glasses of whisky, a microphone and Eddy Mimoun opposite him. That was Ziad Minkara’s description of the conditions for a recent interview. He had brought no prepared remarks, he said, and no communications strategy. For someone whose working life involves getting complicated things to connect, it was an agreeably simple arrangement.

The conversation, released in September 2026, travelled through his childhood between Lebanon, Africa and France, then into the future of business travel. It also returned to an old prediction that he would end up driving a bus. Minkara acknowledged the bus story with amusement. He now runs S4BT - Solutions for Business Travel, the group that grew from CDS, which he founded in 2001.

A bus would, at least, have kept him in the movement business. Instead, he has spent a quarter-century working on the less visible arrangements that allow other people to get somewhere: finding a hotel, booking it through the right system, paying for it and getting the paperwork home.

A room for the independents

Minkara’s account of the beginning is refreshingly unromantic. In a September anniversary reflection, he recalled a market in which hotel chains could afford distribution through global distribution systems, while independent hotels struggled to appear in business travel networks. Dedicated hotel payment arrangements were another gap. CDS began working on those problems, including with American Express and AirPlus.

There is a useful distinction between wanting to build a travel company and noticing that a particular hotel cannot easily be found or paid. His version of the origin story begins with the second. The customer’s inconvenience supplied the brief. Software and financial connections supplied a way to answer it.

By January 2020, CDS offered corporate customers and travel agencies an integrated hotel booking platform, alongside payment, invoicing and reporting. The room was the visible purchase. Around it sat a collection of business requirements: spending rules, records, payment methods and the information a company needed to understand where its money had gone.

Its customers include travel management companies, known as TMCs, and corporate travel buyers. Much of the work takes place behind someone else’s customer relationship. The booking interface is one part of an offering that also includes the arrangements needed to service a stay and account for it afterwards.

The minibar was always part of the plan

For a glimpse of Minkara’s sensibility, go back to 2018. He wrote an essay imagining a connected hotel room that would respond to spoken instructions. The guest could adjust the lights, arrange a car, organise departure and send the expense documentation to an accountant. Then came the small, familiar complication: he had taken nothing from the minibar; could the system please check?

The joke kept the forecast close to the person using it. Minkara also argued that hotels should invest in their welcome and treat distribution platforms as potential partners. A room could be technically connected and still require hospitality. His interest lay in how the pieces worked together, down to the awkward final bill.

His own background crossed borders before the company did. His education includes ISG in the 1990s; he has also described international training in France, the United States and Japan. When discussing his work in 2022, he reached for a fashion comparison: anticipating change requires something like the judgement needed to get a collection and its season right. Timing belongs in the job description.

“Le client fait partie de l’entreprise.”

Ziad Minkara
“The customer is part of the company.” Translation from French.

A company learns to cross borders

The expansion acquired a financial partner in 2020. IDI announced plans to invest approximately €15 million for a substantial minority stake, alongside Minkara, François Machenaud and the existing management. Management would remain the majority owner. Minkara wanted to take the hotel offering further; the agreement gave that ambition a new capital structure.

The acquisitions that followed each brought a different piece. In 2022 came the travel business of Rydoo, which provided the basis for Goelett. The announcement described an enlarged workforce of 150, including roughly 60 developers. For a business built around booking and servicing, engineering capacity was part of the purchase.

Germany’s Corporate Rates Club joined in 2023. SIAP, an Italian provider of technology for travel agencies, followed in late 2024. The group was assembling local expertise as well as products. Hotel distribution in one country, online booking in another and agency systems elsewhere could serve related customers while arriving with different histories.

Recognition arrived along the way. In 2023, CDS received a Trophée d’Or at the Sommet des Entreprises de Croissance, in the French B2B services category above €70 million. The award recognised the company’s development, its work with partners and the jobs created through its expansion.

Partnerships mattered, too. In a 2023 conversation with VoyagExpert’s Eric Ritter, Minkara discussed the demands of supporting an agency across a fragmented European market. The list was concrete: technology, hotel content, payments, back-office services and rail. Ritter described arranging access to Dutch and Belgian regional trains with Goelett in a week. International ambition, in that example, meant somebody could sell the right train.

By 2025, CDS Groupe had become too narrow a name for the collection. Minkara explained that it carried a strong French hotel identity, while the business now served a wider geography and a broader set of needs. S4BT supplied an umbrella. The established brands could keep their identities and contribute complementary capabilities.

The ownership changed as well. A transaction announced in February 2025 brought in Andera Acto, with IDI reinvesting as a minority shareholder, and allowed Minkara to regain majority ownership. It combined outside financial backing with a founder’s renewed control. François Machenaud remained part of the leadership story.

A larger group also needs people to run its parts. In October 2025, Minkara appointed Christopher Hecht as Goelett’s CEO, describing the booking business as a driver of innovation within S4BT. The appointment put another named operator into a story often told through acquisitions. It also made the delegation visible. Minkara’s ambition for the group would depend on people leading individual businesses, developing their products and keeping relationships with customers in working order.

Eighteen months after the handshake

In February 2026, S4BT acquired Travel Centric Technology, the London-based parent of HotelHub. The announcement put the combined group at eight specialist brands and around 700 employees. Half worked in technology and product development. Its stated annual hotel booking volume exceeded $5 billion, with more than 60,000 bookings a day and access to over two million properties.

The British acquisition had taken three years of discussions with HotelHub CEO Jay Virdee. Minkara set out an eighteen-month integration plan, beginning with operational coordination and followed by work to simplify the connections between systems. Existing software interfaces already functioned together. The intended destination was one access point drawing on the hotel booking capabilities across the group.

His description gave cultural integration substantial weight. Teams in different countries would need shared missions without retreating into national compartments. An organisation chart could record the acquisition immediately; cooperation would take longer. The plan offered a useful measure of his next task: making the enlarged business function for its customers.

The figures also give scale to a rather specific ambition. S4BT wants to connect the work from hotel sourcing through payment and financial control, while allowing agency partners to retain their client relationships and commercial choices. Minkara’s company grows by becoming useful inside those relationships. That makes a reliable connection between systems a commercial matter as much as a technical one.

In February 2026, he also became S4BT’s representative at Alliance France Tourisme, which welcomed the group alongside Air France and Comexposium. That placed him in a wider tourism conversation about the economic value of travel in France. His interests had expanded from getting hotels into distribution systems to how business travel fits into the country’s tourism industry.

Making room for a second attempt

There is another set of numbers in Minkara’s working life. He chairs 60 000 rebonds Île-de-France Normandie, the association that helps entrepreneurs find a new professional direction after losing their companies. For 2025, the region recorded 237 entrepreneurs supported and 230 volunteers engaged, across eight reception points.

Here, the infrastructure consists of people: mentors, coaches, specialists and others willing to share experience and time. The association works to change attitudes towards business failure as well as helping individuals move forward. Its mission puts a practical question beside the usual celebration of founders: what happens to entrepreneurial experience when a company closes?

Minkara’s involvement extends beyond lending his name to a cause. The federation’s 2024 activity report recorded a national vice-presidential responsibility for structuring fundraising, alongside his regional presidency. That work involved bringing regional fundraising representatives together to share practices.

In January 2026, he publicly dedicated his commitment to a formative encounter with Guillaume Mulliez. In April, he welcomed the opening of the association’s Caen branch, while explaining that S4BT travel commitments had prevented him attending. There is something recognisable in that detail: a person trying to make room for two kinds of responsibility in the same diary.

Back in the September conversation, Minkara’s attention moved towards artificial intelligence, automation, changing interfaces and the continuing value of advice. His customer principle was plain: the customer belongs within the company. A good idea still has to answer somebody’s need.

That thought sits comfortably beside his work as an association president. One builds the arrangements around a business trip. The other helps people organise a working life after a company ends. Both require attention to what comes next. After twenty-five years, Minkara still seems interested in the onward connection.