BERLIN — Yotel CEO Hubert Viriot understands why people would question the investment thesis behind city-center hotels in major urban markets right now.
Over the course of the pandemic, demand all but zeroed out, especially in cities dependent on international tourism. But as the leader of a hotel brand that has built itself around being centrally located in the major cities of the world, including New York, Miami, San Francisco, London, Singapore and Istanbul — Viriot said he has "always remained confident" that urban markets would bounce back.
"I think big cities have so much to offer socially, economically, and for any generation, but especially the younger crowds that are huge believers in cities," he said while speaking to Hotel News Now at the International Hospitality Investment Forum. "Now, cities may have to be reinvented and be built more around the people and less around the cars and less around the industries. But I think the future's still there."
Viriot said Yotel is still a relatively young company, established in 2007, and it has been able to be more agile in adapting to the new business environment spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The downturn has also been a huge learning experience for Yotel, forcing the company to adopt a more efficient and focused operating model.
"We learned a lot," he said. "We learned, frankly speaking, that we were not prepared for a crisis of this scale."
Viriot said his company had no concept of how to completely shut down operations prior to 2020, and rebuilding from the depths of the pandemic has been painful but educational.
"It was like a vertical learning curve," he said. "We learned so much out of it, and we're a much better, much stronger operator today than we were a year and a half ago. I think most of our owners would agree that the way we operate our hotels now is way more sophisticated because we had to confront in an early stage of our life the biggest crisis ever."
He said one of the biggest lessons is that a hotel company, particularly one that isn't among the largest international brands, shouldn't expect to do things such as develop massive, in-house tech solutions.
"We're in the business of managing hotels on behalf of our owners and with a promise to our customers," he said. "I'm not in the business of building software. There are a lot of great people out there, great companies that have massive budgets to do that. Our job is to be connected with those partners."