In this week’s episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, Hans Meyer, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Zoku, joins Karen Stephens, with an enlightening perspective that counters the traditional setup for hotel accommodations — a hybrid model — combining office spaces and hotel rooms for a multi-functional guest experience. Hans also shares why hotels can go beyond a “heads in beds” approach to solve the loneliness that guests feel when they’re disconnected from their community. The solution involves elevating the food and beverage element of the guest experience to not only bring guests together, but drive ancillary revenue.
Tune in and find out why a hybrid hotel model works and how it creates spaces that are relevant to more travelers, even during the work week.
Meet your host
As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.
Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.
Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com
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Transcript
Intro- 00:00:04: Welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.
Karen Stephens – 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today we’re excited to have Hans Meyer, Co-founder and Managing Director of Zoku, joining us. Hans is a true pioneer in the hospitality space, known for his innovative approach to hotel design and building the future of hybrid hospitality. Hans also co-founded the award-winning citizenM hotel concept, which reshapes how we think about combining work, living, and leisure. At Zoku, he’s taken this a step further, creating a unique hybrid model for business travelers and remote workers. I think what you’ll find in listening to this episode is that I’m talking to a true innovator in the hospitality space. He gives some great nuggets here about how to think differently, really outside the box, to create a unique experience that’s really about connecting people and work and travel and living all in one. So here you go. I give you Hans.
Hans Meyer, welcome to the podcast. We’re so excited to have you here.
Hans Meyer – 00:01:38: Thank you so much for having me.
Karen Stephens – 00:01:40: So you know what, Hans, I might have mentioned to you before, I’ve stayed at your property in Amsterdam — the Zoku — many, many times. So it’s such a cool concept. And I’m really excited to dive in and talk about how you came up with it, because you really had a fascinating career from corporate roles in international hotel chains to co-founding and pioneering concepts like CitizenM and now Zoku. So can you take us through your journey and share kind of what your inspiration came from to get into hospitality in the first place?
Hans Meyer – 00:02:09: Getting into the hospitality was basically when I was tested in my secondary school about my future profession. There was a kind of a thing that I didn’t think about it before, but it immediately struck me. So, I thought, “That’s a nice direction.” And basically, I started off very early, like many people in our industry, to work basically in kitchen restaurants and these kind of things. Went to a hotel school in The Hague after Cornell University in the States, and then basically started my career in more kind of a corporate environment as a Corporate Director for the beverage, and then VP of Development — basically developing new hotel projects globally — so Central America, Africa, Middle East, and of course, Europe. And my last job, I was working for NH, and NH is a pretty big European company. And I felt that given the scale of the company, it’s not always easy to innovate within big companies. So I felt that there was a lot of opportunity for bringing new kind of concepts into the world. So that’s why I basically quit my job and started on something that you might know as citizenM. And I did that for a number of years. And after that, I basically started Zoku. And well, that’s basically where I’m still today, having a lot of fun with a great team and growing Zoku internationally.
Karen Stephens – 00:03:33: So how did you come up with the concept of Zoku? Was it citizenM first and then Zoku after that? But what was the inspiration? Because maybe we should actually take a step back and just talk a little bit about the concept itself. So tell us a little bit about Zoku and the brand, and then let’s talk about how you came up with that. What inspired you?
Hans Meyer – 00:03:50: Well, basically, Zoku is a Japanese word for family, tribe, or clan. Zoku was a subcultural phenomenon in Japan in the 70s where people with the same lifestyle started to basically live together. And with Zoku, we wanted to create a new concept for what we call people who need to live and work in the city between a few days and a few months. And previously, those people stayed in extended-stay hotels or service departments, or they basically rented homes. I felt that there was a huge gap in that market because the initial idea basically came from conversations I had with people who were living and working in semesterly. So, for example, a guy called Pascal, who lived and worked in 35 countries in just five years for Microsoft. I started to interview those people. I basically interviewed 150 of them to get not a very clear idea of what they want. Because I learned that often people don’t know exactly what they want, but they know exactly what they don’t want, what frustrates them. And what I learned is if you stay in a city you don’t know, where you don’t speak the language, then after a few days or weeks, you start to feel disconnected. And the entire idea of Zoku was basically to connect and inspire people to basically bring them together when they are living and working internationally. After this initial experience with talking to those people, I decided to step out of my own shoes and step into the shoes of my target. So I live myself as what we call today a digital or a global nomad. So I spent two months in Buenos Aires, two months in Bali, and two months in Washington, DC to really experience that lifestyle and also to immerse myself in a local culture and understand how enriching it is to live and work internationally for a number of months. And finally decided to collaborate with the target audience to develop the concept from scratch, basically going back what Zoku is currently, it’s a hybrid between a home and an office, topped with hotel services and the social buzz of its thriving neighborhood.
Karen Stephens – 00:05:55: Yeah, and that’s exactly, that is a perfect description of what it is for Amsterdam. I mean, that’s the one I can speak of for sure. So when was the first Zoku opened? Because I think you hit on something really important here. The global nomad trend really kicked off after COVID, right? Or during COVID, during that, when people realized, “Hey, I don’t have an office anymore. I could really be anywhere because I just have a computer so I can go see the world.” But when did you open the first Zoku?
Hans Meyer – 00:06:20: I mean, you’re absolutely right. We were a little bit early. So we opened up the first Zoku in 2016, and after that basically COVID hit. And you’re perfectly right. COVID was a kind of a catalyst for certain developments within society that were already there for a longer period. But basically it has risen at a much faster pace. So everything related to hybrid work, remote work, work used to be a place, but it became far more kind of an activity. And for that also people were looking for more flexible options. And that’s why we also see this entire movement around remote working, hybrid working, team offsites, team retreats. We basically saw it grow exponentially during the last few years.
Karen Stephens – 00:07:04: Absolutely. So the hotel itself — let’s talk a little bit about the rooms and the concept. It feels like an apartment. So I would say that it feels more like a flat than a hotel room. So can you talk a little bit about the space itself and how that is organized? And then I’d love to talk about the common areas, because I think when you talk about that family element or really getting to know other people. I’d love to move to that. But first, let’s hit on the rooms itself, because that’s a unique experience, I think, in itself.
Hans Meyer – 00:07:30: Yeah, so basically, if you look to hotel rooms and studio apartments, in 99.9% of those rooms and studio apartments, the bed is always the most dominant piece of furniture. But if you stay in a city for a long appearance, you might want to invite people over in your personal space, but you don’t want to give them the experience to sit on the bed. So our initial idea was to create more kind of a home instead of a typical hotel room, where you find everything to live comfortably, but also to work efficiently. And also with some options to personalize the space. That was the entire idea. So what we created is something that also would fit on a relatively small floor plan, 24 square meters. Because as you know, land and construction is pretty expensive, but also people want to be in nice locations. And then of course, you have to pay a little bit more extra. So we also created a kind of a very smart space, where we stacked all the traditional elements from a normal home onto each other. Like storage, the kitchen was stacked, the bathroom was integrated. So it’s kind of a furniture system. And the rest of the space is basically open space. So in this space, the bed is really hidden. And that’s why we can use the same space as a hotel room. You can use it as a service department. You can use it as a private office. You can invite people over for a meeting or even having a dinner. So very much flexible space. And then with regards to the social spaces, we all know those empty, boring hotel lobbies. And what we try to do is facilitate effortless connections in our social spaces. And then the first thing you need to do is take out the traditional barriers between guests and staff. So when you arrive at Zoku, you don’t have a traditional reception desk. It’s a welcoming coffee bar. The bar is open anyway. You can continue walk through the space and then you’re in the living kitchen where you just can have a conversation with the chef. So basically we opened up all the spaces. Apart from that, we turned the hotel thinking upside down. Normally always the social spaces or the common areas on the ground floor and above that there are rooms. But we feel that daylight and green and outside spaces are very much important for wellbeing. So that’s why we put all the social spaces on the roof and a beautiful roof garden, added a greenhouse over there, two different roof terraces to really get the people to experience the seasons in an urban context, enjoy green and lots of daylight over there. And this is really a space where people come together and mingle very easily. And also the borders between our staff and guests are basically disappeared. So that makes it on one side very professional, but also very informal.
Karen Stephens – 00:10:15: Yeah. So I think that having it on the rooftop is such a brilliant idea because you do have that sunlight. There’s beautiful spaces to gather, and to sit, and to have a coffee on your own or meet other people. And it really does encourage that social connection. So, I mean, obviously I’m a super fan, but I can just say that as someone who’s traveled for most of my career, it is such a refreshing way to be in a hotel because you instantly feel like you can have a coffee, meet people. And the last thing I’ll say about it is the food at the Zoku in Amsterdam. It makes sense that you have a food and beverage background because honestly, the food is really, really beautiful. And again, it encourages that family style kind of collective eating together.
Hans Meyer – 00:10:54: Yeah. It’s so nice that you say it because in our industry, so often hoteliers, they find food and beverage complicated because selling rooms is easier. But we felt that when we did our research and we also talked to anthropologists, for example, “How do people connect? How do people connect with their communities?” And in any case, what we learned in every single culture in the world, eating and drinking is the most social activity. So that’s why we put a lot of effort in that to foster those connections, to create a space where people can share bread, cheese and wine on the long communal tables. And we fostered also those connections. Because, for example, our long staying guests, we have weekly community dinners where they are invited for free to join in for the first dinner. And then we connect them to different other people. And this is a way that people can build up very easily. And that’s really something that other competitors, or Airbnb, or the other service department providers without any social space, it just cannot provide.
Karen Stephens – 00:11:54: Isn’t provided. That’s right. So we’ve talked a lot about the human experience at Zoku. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about technology. So technology is really at the heart of Zoku’s design, particularly when it comes to creating more personalized experiences. So how does Zoku use technology to innovate its design and what role can it play in the guest experience?
Hans Meyer – 00:12:14: So first thing, we did a lot of experimentation. We learned a lot from other industries. So for example, we had a kind of a lean startup principles within Zoku where we created minimal viable products — which is very common in the tech world – before we invested more and more money. And I think one of the most interesting parts was how we developed the prototypes of the Zoku Lofts because it’s quite common in our industry that you build one prototype. We started with building prototypes that would fit on our hand and then we slowly built iterated prototypes. And the last prototype, we, for example, used mobile EEG scanning and cameras. So people who never visit the rules, they got a mobile EEG scanners on their head where we could measure emotions to emotions, anxiety, and excitement together with cameras. And that really helped us to make the design even more intuitive. What we are doing now is using VR for our designs — give the fact that the technology is there and it really helps us to tweak our designs before we actually implement them. But the same thing as well, technology for our guests is important. So they can basically choose, do I want to check in myself at the kiosk or do I want to have a service to check in? We have a lot of technology involved, also related to sustainability. For example, in our lofts, we measure the CO2 because you can imagine if you were four people sitting at a table having dinner, then you’ll need a little bit more fresh air and oxygen than if the loft is just used by one person. So technology is basically, integrated into the entire console, not only from an operational point of view, but also from a concept development and testing point of view.
Karen Stephens – 00:13:51: Wow, that is incredible. Just had no idea all of that was going on behind the scenes. So as a pioneer in a, let’s call it a new type of hospitality, what advice would you give to others in the industry and how to use innovation to solve those problems? Like, how did you start to think about? I mean, those things wouldn’t even occur to me. So what advice would you give for someone who’s like kind of nascent in the industry? How to think about even solving the problems that you might not even know exist, I guess, is the best way to say it.
Hans Meyer – 00:14:20: I think the interesting thing is first, you need to find what is the problem. I mean, most hoteliers think putting heads in beds — that’s a kind of their business model. We found that if people feel lonely or disconnected, that is a problem. So that’s the first thing that you want to solve. Secondly, I’m not a very big believer — make a product that everybody likes. I’m a big believer in make very deliberate decisions about which part of the market you want to focus on, and make it perfect for this part of the market. I always prefer to be big in a small market than to be small in a big market. Third advice, what I would give is dare to start from scratch. We are very much limited to what we currently have. And that basically blocks our thinking. So even if you need to implement it in an existing property, always take the freedom to start up from scratch. I mean, take a white sheet of paper. How would you do it if you would do it all over again? And only after that, you can start to think about, “Okay, which elements can I take over to put in my existing property?” One thing what I would say is always put people first. I mean, at the end of the day, if you make a fantastic product and you provide it in a very efficient way, the money comes by itself. It’s not the other way around to start up with a kind of Excel sheet and try to get as much money out of it, but really reverse it. Make, actually, I mean, we are in the industry of making people happy, of facilitating them in the best possible way. If they’re living and working internationally, that’s our key focus and the rest will follow. And it’s very much interesting. Don’t look to your peers in the hotel industry. I think I learned most from other industries. Where are those successful business models? I mean, for citizenM, I look to the low-cost carriers and fashion brands who made fashion affordable for the wider target audience. And for Zoku, I look to the tech companies. What kind of principles are they implementing here? How does sociology, how does anthropology work? So not the normal thinking from your own industry, would really invite people from other expertises into your team thinking.
Karen Stephens – 00:16:26: You know what? I think that a couple of things that you said there really hit home with me. First of all, don’t be afraid to start from scratch. So I think if you look at the example of you were in the corporate world, and you took a step out of that, and literally on the back of a napkin came up with these concepts. So being brave. And then I really want to underline 100% looking to other industries. I feel like in hospitality, so many of us come into this industry and we stay in this industry because we love it. But you have to pick your head up and look around and see what’s happening outside of that. So that is a wonderful, wonderful piece of advice. So my last question for you, after such a successful journey with Zoku, what’s next for you? I mean, are there any ventures or ideas you’re particularly excited about that you can share as you look towards the future of hospitality?
Hans Meyer – 00:17:11: So first of all, I love to work here at Zoku. I love to continue to work at Zoku. I love to grow Zoku. But in any case, the kind of development that I actually see happening, but also really fits to Zoku, is that I see that our lifestyles become even more flexible. So we shop from the couch. We work from home, and we work from different areas in the world. And also what I see is that the world of offices and hotels are going to emerge. So hospitality becomes more important in offices. And if you look to hotels, they offer more workspaces. So I basically see those kind of worlds merge towards each other because also hospitality hotels are more focused on providing spaces during nighttime, offices during daytime. And I see a lot of interesting overlaps coming in the industry where I feel we can use buildings far more efficient and we can create places which are more relevant for more people during more months of the week. I mean, not a lot of hotels, they focus on the neighborhood, for example, but I feel that hotels can be fantastic places for neighboring people. And we see here at Zoku is that 50%% of our food and beverage revenue is from the neighborhood, which is exceptional for many hotels. During the day, we have co-working members in our social spaces. They’re often neighbors who come from the area, who are self-employed professionals or work for companies. And during their work from home, they work at Zoku. I think this is especially interesting that we really create lively buildings instead of those dead office buildings, which are used 10% of the time. The rest of the time, they’re always empty. And everything related to well-being becomes an even more aspect also in the hotel industry, whether it’s physical well-being, whether it’s mental well-being. And I think these kinds of developments, emerging hotel and offices, bringing well-being more to the world of hospitality, and work, I think those are very exciting areas that we want to dive into.
Karen Stephens – 00:19:13: So if someone wants to experience Zoku for themselves, where do you have your locations now?
Hans Meyer – 00:19:18: We have four Zoku at the moment in four European capitals. We are located in Amsterdam. Then during COVID, we opened up Vienna and Copenhagen. And in 2023, we opened Zoku Paris.
Karen Stephens – 00:19:31: Awesome. All right. You heard it here first. Thank you so much, Hans. It’s been a wonderful conversation. I wish you all the best in 2025.
Hans Meyer – 00:19:37: It was a big pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.
Outro – 00:19:44: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.
